IAM, in particular, was a huge undertaking in jamming fine-grained access rights onto existing resources where none such existed before, and it was pretty much marching orders from above: "Potential clients can't migrate off AWS because AWS has this and we don't." And it caused more than its fair share of "Why is this API suddenly throwing errors" tickets from existing users who were accustom to the pre-IAM permissions model.

ETA: Re-reading my initial statement, it was over-broad. There is room in Cloud for bottom-up engineering and product design. However, especially relative to the rest of the company (where Google is an industry leader, not entering a market already heavily dominated by an elephant), Cloud spends a lot of its time chasing "table-stakes" features to enable new customers to be on-boarded who can't subscribe to Cloud because they can't migrate their existing flow off AWS without X Y or Z analogous feature available in GCP.

Whatever the heck Vertex AI is compared against the Sagemaker+Ground Truth pile that AWS has. By no means is any of it groundbreaking from either company, just piling open source software and buckets behind UIs, but it seems GCP is doing catch-up there.

I would be more concerned if your org wasn't doing this. AWS does it all the time too. The parent post is wrong to paint this as a negative. And GCP has some unquestionably industry leading products too (BigQuery, GKE, Spanner, AI/ML services)