The stuff he stole wasn't necessarily his own work. Page is saying that not only Levandowski didn't help, he also stole the hard work of the other engineers.
Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.
It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.
I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.
Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.
I can understand Page feeling that way, since he had to get dragged into the dispute between Levandowski and Thrun's replacement.
Well (for the defense!) I could argue that you were tied to her for other reasons and/or were co-dependent. After all people stay in abusive and bad relationships frequently and not just for money reasons for all sorts of emotional reasons.
When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.
The article nor Page claim that alleged theft of trade secrets has somehow slowed down Waymo's progress.
I agree and for every large corporation I worked at, hearing something like this is quite odd to say the least. I would think Page would dispatch some underling to sort them out instead. Or was the project that important that Page felt he had to get involved to save it from disaster?