My feeling is that google have paid only lip service to that for more than a decade now? Ads are now much, much more important due to lack of meaningful search competition.
Remember ads used to be clearly separate from search results? That's a long time ago. Google make a load of money selling $company the first hit for the search string with $company_name which is an ad so $company_competition can't steal their search result. Then take the cash when the person searching for $company clicks the first link that comes up when they search for company. That's closer to protection rackets and stand-over tactics than focus on a bread-and-butter of legit search results.
That's just one example of modern google. Remember "I'm feeling lucky?" Quite the contrast nowadays isn't it. Unrecognizably different in the google approach. But also it's difficult to take a legitimate result focus seriously if you've ever done a google search on a phone. Try it.
Google are really happy to get any bidding war for advertising content going and have such a dominant position they don't care at all what you think about it. This particular suggestion of what they might be doing? I dunno. It'll probably leak if it's true. It is completely and totally consistent with modern google.