If your Google programmers were delivering until the bloody pandemic, there's nothing wrong with them.

Sure, maybe they're not experts in every API - but they proved for months their productivity, in easy and hard tasks (by your admission).

As an engineering manager I've dealt with covid performance issues in three different companies (two of which were already remote pre pandemic).

Incidentally I've dealt with performance problems for depressed people a few times in my career and COVID performance issues felt exactly like those. It just happened to the majority of people.

Turns out that if you do everything possible to remove everything that's good out of people' lives, their performance suffer!

I really don't understand how you can go from what happened to you to "my engineers know to code only with Google" but you should really rethink that.

I wish you and your teams well.