You may be right about the husk-ness. Sometimes companies can recover from this kind of cultural damage --- look at Microsoft's renaissance. But this kind of damage frequently causes talent flight and a death spiral.

I still think it had to be done. The activists wanted to turn the company into a tool for advancing a fringe political agenda, even if unprofitable No leadership group can or should tolerate that kind of hijacking.

It'd have been better for this culture war not to have started at all. But once the activists started it, it became an existential imperative for Google to finish it --- which it did.