I am also at Google, and I can corroborate this experience personally and corroborate this based off of comments teammates make to me, in group settings, and in

I am also at Google, and I can corroborate this experience personally and corroborate this based off of comments teammates make to me, in group settings, and in team retrospectives. There are a lot of technical challenges in maintaining code health in a monorepo with 100k+ active contributors, so teams and individuals get a lot of plausible excuses for kicking the problem down the road, and truly improving code health is not appropriately incentivized. One common occurrence is a broken monorepo, so one just waits until someone fixes the monorepo, and you retry submitting your code again. It's such a common occurrence that people generally do not investigate brokenness, and maybe the monorepo wasn't broken but your code change actually made things even flakier, but no one would be able to distinguish that from a broken monorepo that eventually got fixed when no one bothers to check anymore.