It's reasonable to not understand their decision, but it's also reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what's best for their team and product (and in that order).

Googlers (like myself) are probably the least materially affected by COVID-19. We are well compensated and most aren't living paycheck to paycheck. We have great medical benefits. Our schedules are flexible and working from home is fairly feasible for most teams. Many are young enough to not have kids, or compensated well-enough to have a stay-at-home partner.

And technically, for many of us, working from home is fairly straightforward. Google already has much of that infrastructure in place. Many teams are already distributed across sites and used to working over email and VC. We all have laptops, etc. Some of us work on open source where it's trivial to have full access to source code when not on the corporate network.

Even so, my rough estimate is that my team is about 30% less effective right now. Like you say, it's not because working from home is hard. It's because staying focused on code during a global pandemic that will kill unknown people, is causing massive suffering for people who aren't as fortunate as we Googlers, and may lead to a depression the likes of which haven't been seen in a hundred years is really hard.

We're all trying to survive a monumentally catastrophic event with our health and wits intact the best way we know how. The history books are going to write about how millions low-risk young people self-quarantined to protect the older generation. They will remember the states and countries that suspended evictions and mortgages.

No one's going to give a damn that Chrome skipped a release or two. At the scale of shit the world is dealing with right now, it just doesn't matter.