One of the first examples there of not killing a product is "Inbox -> GMail Features" which is almost entirely misleading. The biggest productivity benefits from Inbox, such as bundles and leaving notes directly in the inbox have not been ported. And of course the biggest benefit of Inbox was the clean interface itself. I still curse Google under my breath every day about them killing it off.

The first example (GPM -> Youtube Music) is a great example of why 'merged into other products' doesn't delegitimize complaints about Google killing products.

YTM (last time I checked) lacks feature parity with its predecessor, has a questionable migration path, and seems more interested in music videos that you can incidentally play as songs. It integrates messily with its host platform (hn comments on the last thread I read about it indicated that Google's algorithms were inadvertantly tagging unrelated content as 'music'), and dilutes focus on the prior project's core feature-set.

Just because another product's abstract contains some of the product I'm using's core doesn't mean I want to switch over to it because Google's got a short attention span, and wants to reimplement the product I'm using in the most approximate manner possible.

Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.

I dont know which is worse, killing a product that you are using or asking you to switch to another new product which does almost same thing :(