In Perforce, which is more or less what Google is using, you can branch any directory within the repo. (You would never branch the whole repo; that makes no sense.) So if you wanted to construct a directory with one version of one subdirectory, and a different version of another subdirectory, that's quite straightforward.

Yep, and if you want to keep folders you didn't branch up to date with master you have to continuously rebase.

Not having it this way would be equivalent to having subrepo that refers to HEAD instead of a specific commit which is normally considered an big anti-pattern.

The best remedy is to not do branching like this in the first place, just try to stay on trunk all the time.