IANAL but "We're in an extremely competitive industry and we might lose all of our best people if we do this" is a perfectly good reason to give shareholders. It only breaks fiduciary duty if the executives have concrete data that their actions will have zero impact on hiring, which is a stretch.
> we might lose all of our best people if we do this
This is the argument media seems to be making for long time. So far instead of all not even 0.01% seems to have shown conviction and left Google. Or it just might be the case the best people seems more concerned only with technical issues at work.
