This was a reasonable argument to make in, say, 2012, but not in 2022, when the company grew to something like 100k+ engineers. The hiring standards have definitely deteriorated, because you can’t hit these numbers with very high hiring bar. I worked at Google between 2014 and 2019, and observed it myself, and it got even worse after that: I interviewed a bunch of laid off Googlers, and while some of them were solid, I have met multiple who were barely able to pass a phone screen.