There are upsides of having managers not have the level of control over their reports' futures that they do at most companies. (It accomplishes goals of reducing discrimination and it makes people less vulnerable and thus boosts retention.)
There are reasons that the process overhead to accomplish anything at Google is more than at a company like pre-acquisition Waze. (It simply gets 100x more backlash when Google makes a misstep on some of this stuff than any company, in part because they have a responsibility as stewards of so many experiences and so much data. There's also a culture of doing a really crappy job in a first pass -- I think this might be fostered by the process overhead, but it certainly makes removing it very dangerous.)
There are benefits to a comp model that doesn't actually reward you for what you accomplish. (You can get some of your best people to focus long-term.)
There are OBVIOUS benefits to a culture that values political correctness. The author didn't make it clear that he wasn't just being an asshole.
I think, on balance, that Google is unhealthy and could use some more Noam in it, but I think it's not intuitive to everyone why these things are done.