"I have a change to propose to the http standard that doesn't consider the 20 year history of UDP amplification attacks and breaks all existing servers and browsers!"
or
"I think some websites like Pinterest should dominate all of the google image search results instead of any other website in the world!"
or
"Autoplaying audio is hostile to users except for the few sites we (Google) run and the list of people we think are okay?"
Honestly. Have you been involved in these types of short-sighted and blatently evil decisions? That's why I said I don't blame the engineers. The banality of the day-to-day with a room-full-of-juniors likely doesn't even consider any consequences beyond "xyz is yelling at me".
I don't know what you're referring to with the first two. On the third, I've been involved in some autoplay discussions and there's never been any discussion of preferencing Google or any other website; there's been a lot of discussion of unintended consequences and workarounds, like when chrome tried to turn off autoplay and sites worked around it with JavaScript, <canvas>, and the audio API. The result was that users saw just as many ads, but with much worse battery life, and am uptick in crypto mining as bad actors realized the power they held. Of course when we then walked that back, we were told it was because we loved ads.
My memory or the auto-play thing is that some withgoogle.com functionality broke, it was quickly put on the blessed list, and then it was working again. Sadly the rest of the web that was broken by that change didn't get such treatment.
