The truth is twofold.
One: if the barrier can be melted according to magic rules, then it is no real barrier. It is a sweet candy coating that melts in your mouth, not in your hands.
Two: if a corporation is made of many incidental strangers who happen to share an employer for overlapping moments in time, and the system has at least one authorization bypass, then so does the audit trail.
If you don't think corporations implode, suffer from disgruntled criminal employees, sell out to rivals, go completely bankrupt, or land themselves in jail, then bet all of your secrets on the idea that what they tell you is 100% truth.
The following isn't about Google as such: Thing with a disgruntled criminal employee is that they don't usually come in bunches and don't collude because they can't easily identify each other. Which means they can't generally commit such acts and then also corrupt a whole 'nother department to cover it up.
This doesn't protect against government action, and not at Google leadership specifically targetting you. But it does prevent the (rather common) abuse of such access by regular employees.
Could’ve fooled me. Or maybe your standards are just particularly low. Do you mind explaining where surveillance capitalism fits into your principled worldview?
* Strong identity: employees must be strongly identified before acting.
* Multi-party authz: nobody ever acts alone. One person can't be trusted, two people might be, M of N effectively represents the company.
* Noisy security: making a change to security parameters notifies all relevant parties in a way that intentionally avoids notification fatigue. You can't sneak a change through.
* Full auditability: even after the fact you can readily unravel what was done, seeing what the old state was, what was changed, who made the change, and who approved it.
Get those points, and a few other minor details, and this larger problem actually becomes tractible.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/fbi_spying_abuse/
I'm not entirely sure the old generic answers apply these days...
SOC seems to be the gold standard in terms of what enterprises are asking for, these days. Not that it addresses all the concerns as discussed here, but it does probably start to answer your question.
E&Y does (apparently), and Google is compliant with some ISO standard for software security. See "Does giving Google access to my data create a security risk? How does Google ensure that its employees do not pose a threat?"