> Some thought the direction was wrong - not gathering enough test data (unlike Tesla).

FWIW if you gather a ton of data and don't have simulation it's pretty much useless. Also it's expensive to keep around large amounts of data. Tesla didn't even have a simulation team until relatively recently.

> Some saw the tech as fairly old. Remember much of Waymo's code was written by Urmson 10 years ago. Probably all C/C++. Not very nimble and quick to extend.

Do you work in autonomous vehicles? Most teams are using C/C++. If you're not waymo you probably use ROS.

If you've ever worked at Google you'd know their C/C++ stack is among the most pleasant to deal with because much of the bad cruft from those languages is abstracted away in stable libraries.