Good riddance, work is work, political agendas outside the office space please.
Her team was very specifically engaged in culture war, and wanted to wield Google’s clout in that war. Google disagreed. That disagreement led to her co-lead refusing to withdraw and edit a paper, so that co-lead was terminated. This really shouldn’t have escalated as much as it did, but it happened, tough shit. Meg was understandably upset about this, but then [appears to have] made the unforced error of sending internal documents to external accounts, and thus was canned.
Companies generally need to be able to trust that you aren’t going to violate their security policies, even when you’re upset about and disagree with their decisions. That’s why she was fired. Every other goddamn thing about this is an irritating optics war between the people that want to use this as ammunition in a crusade to prove that Google doesn’t care about ethics-and-also-minorities [which is manifestly not the case], versus the people that are legally obligated to never say anything publicly about internal matters.
It’s shitty and tiresome, but it has nothing to do with ethics.
But can't there be an ombudsman mechanism within Google to settle such acrimony before it spills over into the larger public domain? Perhaps there is such a mechanism, I don't know about it. An outright firing seems very high-handed, and this is what dismays people.
But that model isn't winning right now, if anything it seems that political agendas are encompassing more and more spaces.