It's a tradeoff. Google has no incentives to allow an arbitrary component run standalone. Quite the contrary. What they do get in return for the coupling is t

It's a tradeoff. Google has no incentives to allow an arbitrary component run standalone. Quite the contrary. What they do get in return for the coupling is that they can evolve the common libraries and code patterns across the board (there are even automated code refactoring tools that help you do massive code changes, automating code review sessions across hundreds and hundreds of teams, with all changes tested against all reverse dependencies etc etc). All this allows for a level of internal code quality that is hard to see elsewhere. Unless you really care a lot about that one requirement you seem to care about. In that case, yeah, you'd choose a different tradeoff.