Different companies, different industries, different rules.
Researchers can publish anything they like as long as it's uncontroversial. Google sponsors tons of work for which there is no oversight.
But if you're going to directly make the company look bad, then yes, it's delusional.
It's one thing to protect whistle blowers, it's another thing to make bad public statements. The previously fired researcher wanted to demonstrate how training AI was energy intensive and that was a problem, though in the grand scheme it may not be i.e. it's not as though model training is a primary source of energy draw. Google wanted to review the work and asked her to include more recent information about how Google had actually improved energy consumption process given the old data set from the research.
That's perfectly reasonable. Corporate HQ asks the researcher to include more recent data which doesn't make the company look so bad? On a scale of 1-10 in terms of interference that's a 1 or 2. I suggest the vast majority of researchers would be fine with that, and consider it ethical.
Juul probably hires scientists more along the lines of cigarette companies wanting to provide science to show that cigarette smoking is not harmful. That's another thing altogether.