"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
I imagine it's hard to push back against it even internally. Not to be jaded, but one or two people raising a stink about it will only achieve them screwing up their career prospects within Google.
A cynic might observe that the tech sector - and US big tech in particular - has just seen the biggest round of layoffs that many of the developers in that market will remember. Many of those same developers might have been thinking even 18 months ago that their extremely high compensation was guaranteed because finding another extremely well compensated job was easy. Now they know better and I'm sure a lot of people are scared. Seems like a good time for management to push bad ideas that their remaining employees might not like.
I imagine it's hard to push back against it even internally. Not to be jaded, but one or two people raising a stink about it will only achieve them screwing up their career prospects within Google.