I haven't ever had to deal with a Google person regarding Android development, but when I built stuff for Blackberry (miss that company), they always provided nice and detailed feedback. Blackberry famously let legal influence design, so I would be surprised if it was a cover your ass thing.
They have also turned off all reviews in the Chrome Web Store: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935092
Do you have a source or link for this at all for further reading? A quick search doesn't turn up anything, but it sounds like a great read
An intern who I went to school with told me about how legal once chose the colors for a dashboard he worked on as they did not want to seem to be copying some other company.
A co-op complained about them being in every meeting and constantly shooting stuff down.
The one written reference to it I know about was in a 2011 open letter.
https://bgr.com/2011/06/30/open-letter-to-blackberry-bosses-...