I find it interesting that you use the word “champion”. I had a discussion the other day with a well experienced consulting colleague of mine. His view was that

I find it interesting that you use the word “champion”. I had a discussion the other day with a well experienced consulting colleague of mine. His view was that every company has Champions which in turn reflect the company culture and values. For consulting companies these are partners. For google it used to be the CS PhDs (my guess). Maybe, this is changing at google right now and other people are becoming the “champions”, which might explain the underlying reasons this happened in the first place