Did Google ever have a real Don't be Evil era?
In the early days of Google in the public consciousness, this turned into "you can make money without being evil." (From the 2004 S-1.)
Over time, it got shortened to "don't be evil." But this phrase became an obligatory catchphrase for anyone's gripes against Google The Megacorp. Hey, Google, how come there's no dark mode on this page? Whatever happened to "don't be evil"? It didn't serve its purpose anymore, so it was dropped.
Answering your question really depends on your priors. I could see someone honestly believing Google was never in that era, or that it has always been from the start. I strongly believe that the original (and today admittedly stale) sentiment has never changed.
The public already demonstrated that they adopted, misused and weaponized the maxim. Its retirement just sharpened the edge of that weapon. Now instead of "What happened to don't be evil?" it's become "Of course Google is being evil." and everything exists in that lens.
Tech industry culture today is pretty much finance bro culture, plus a couple decades of domain-specific conditioning for abuse.
But at the time Google started, even the newly-arrived gold rush people didn't think like that.
And the more experienced people often had been brought up in altruistic Internet culture: they wanted to bring the goodness to everyone, and were aware of some abuse threats by extrapolating from non-Internet society.
And if it were the altruistic Internet people they hired, the slogan/mantra could be seen as a reminder to check your ego/ambition/enthusiasm, as well as a shorthand for communicating when you were doing that, and that would be respected by everyone because it had been blessed from the top as a Prime Directive.
Today, if a tech company says they aspire not to be evil: (1) they almost certainly don't mean it, in the current culture and investment environment, or they wouldn't have gotten money from VCs (who invest in people motivated like themselves); (2) most of their hires won't believe it, except perhaps new grads who probably haven't thought much about it; and (3) nobody will follow through on it (e.g., witness how almost all OpenAI employees literally signed to enable the big-money finance-bro coup of supposedly a public interest non-profit).
For example, my impression at the time was that people thought that Google would be a responsible steward of Usenet archives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#Preserving_Usene...
FWIW, it absolutely was believable to me at the time that another Internet person would do a company consistent with what I saw as the dominant (pre-gold-rush) Internet culture.
For example of a personality familiar to more people on HN, one might have trusted that Aaron Swartz was being genuine, if he said he wanted to do a company that wouldn't be evil.
(I had actually proposed a similar corporate rule to a prospective co-founder, at a time when Google might've still been hosted at Stanford. Though the co-founder was new to Internet, and didn't have the same thinking.)
Google's "don't be evil" was a way for them to say "we're regular Joes, just like you; we're not Microsoft, and we're not going to do bad stuff like they do".