Offering 20% time and then engineering a company with an internal culture that makes it so that you can’t take the 20% time is functionally equivalent of not having the time.

I know your response is going to be “well, it’s available and is the employees choice” which is exactly the type of culture engineering I’m talking about

The most creative people are high in trait openness, and are conflict avoiders. The situation you describe is likely to result in only the more disagreeable people taking the 20% with the creative opens not taking it to avoid conflict - so there we are, google engineered an internal culture where their 20% time is not taken by those who it would be most beneficial for google to do so.

This is partially why I left google after 3 years of working there, because I could see that it was just about myopic immediate goals and creativity and curiosity are no longer valued

This is largely why we haven’t seen much innovation out of google in the last 4-5 years, because it’s become a max($) optimiser.

Google don’t want open, creative ideas, they want a bunch of naïve young programmers who they can Overwork because “working at Google is cool”, but Google’s problem is that the smart young are now wising up to this, and their image is shaking. This will result in all of the B level programmers flooding into Google (when I started there it was all A’s, then the Bs started permeating 2 years later) now the place is filling up with walking calculators - brilliant at arithmetic but no lateral thinking.