My impression when it was announced was it started as a really neat personal project by some long-time OS development nerds (I mean that in a good way) that then escaped the gates and then it became a hammer in search of nails.
It ended up eating the project I was on, and was many many years late in the process of doing so, breaking schedule promise after schedule promise. I kept waiting for management to put a lid on it, but they seemed to have infinite headcount and budget, and patience from mgmt to support their mission to rewrite the world while we struggled to get time and resources to maintain the codebase we already had which was shipped as a profitable product and sitting in millions of people's homes with good reviews.
Google has OS politics dysfunction... especially in hardware devices where there are almost a half dozen Linux distributions fighting it out for marketshare. Fuchsia just added to that craziness.