Google isn't an engineering paragon anymore, it's too large.

I speak from what I've seen in how they handle their development & releases for Angular 2, which is a fairly large project with an equally large community.

Take a look at this release candidate, which is in between other release candidate RC.5. It has over 100+ breaking changes with new features

https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#...

This is practically against against all definitions of what a release candidate should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Re... .

So this neatly painted blanket statement of 'at google' we do x,y,z for development, new features & reviewers isn't true. There are very messy projects & development practices, practically like at any other large company.