Two things. First, it seems that the HC has thus far been doing a pretty good job selecting candidates. People seem very happy with how Google is doing overall, and it's widely thought that the engineers there are on the whole fairly good at their jobs. Maybe things would be better if decisions could be made by individuals throughout the company. But it also seems like this could lead to more bad apples, and eventually to organizations full of them, like the MSN org at Microsoft. Being on a committee makes it psychologically easier to reject candidates, which is probably a desired effect.

Also, who do you propose might make the decision if not a committee? Managers certainly can't be allowed to, at least not unilaterally, because they have all kinds of conflicts of interest that might encourage them to hire subpar people.

I don't think "committees are universally bad" is a widely held view. For example, almost all companies are led, ultimately, by a committee (a board). They have their uses. Maybe hiring is one of them.

Now, about cult followings. One of the guys in that story, Bogdan, is famous for terse denials of various sorts of requests that might be sent his way (e.g. for more bandwidth, for a certain service in a datacenter, etc.). This was true to the extent that for a long time googlers on the kernel team maintained an extension at /proc/bogdan. When cat'd, it would print things like:

    No.
    No.
    We're already doing that.
    No.
    Absolutely not.