Oddly defensive considering that a) nobody in the thread seems to be american and b) none of those things apply to your average google employee (the original subject that was being discussed)
Perhaps this is a uniquely american problem, but I doubt very many people at my company actually uses their 30+ vacation days.
That's actually the American problem. For the bunch of European countries where I've worked/interacted a lot with, most people don't have days off left at the end of the year, or maybe have a handful.
And there are some periods when people are gone for long stretches of time (2+ weeks). In France August is practically a national holiday, it's super common to send someone an email in late July and get a reply saying: "I'll be back in early September".
From what I've seen from my US colleagues, they usually take a peppering of 1-2-3 days or maybe a week at most, and if they do have a ton of days off, I can't imagine they use them up.
In Romania I had a case where I had some PTO days saved and I went away on December 20 or so and came back on February 3 (got a bit lucky that year with public holidays, but still).
I usually take 4 weeks in July. Then vacation/time off just before Christmas until a week after New Year.
I have friends who instead of increased salary have asked for more vacation weeks, and have now 7 weeks of vacation. And they use it every year.
Last two tech companies I’ve worked at offer unlimited vacation. Which is a funny problem so to speak, as some of my colleagues make a good use of it and others don’t. I’ve used 36 days in 2020, mostly because there was a big push from the HR to make sure people take regular long breaks at least once per quarter (I’ve used only 21 in 2019).
Everybody also gets unlimited paid sick days. At my current company 3+ days require a proof from the Doc, otherwise no questions asked.
There’s also 8 days of bank holidays pa in the UK. These don’t have to be given as paid leave, but I’ve never heard of anyone in an office job to ever work on a bank holiday (unless they wanted to swap)