I wonder what the intended tone is here. I would argue that you're exactly right. Google wants to have their cake and eat it too - they want engagement through

I wonder what the intended tone is here. I would argue that you're exactly right. Google wants to have their cake and eat it too - they want engagement through rage and unreality, but they don't want to be seen as enabling that kind of thing, so they do performative and largely useless measures like banning people who have large following elsewhere and putting Wikipedia links under Flat Earth articles, but don't actually address the core problem: that they make more money when people get angry for no reason, and thus they have to incentivize that kind of art and "journalism" on their platform. We see this from the other side every year come Pride; companies put rainbow shit all over their sites while maintaining LGBTQ+ exclusive practices because they don't want to lose their bigoted customers.