These Googler comments crack me up. "It may seem like this is out of control, etc., but for Google/my team..." That's just straight cruft, whether you are at Google or Billy Joe Bob's software shop.
Ok there's some cruft there, but if you remove the cruft, you'll still be left with, say, 700 flags, which a lot. So the point is that it's basically ok to have a lot of flags.
I don’t know, engineers default to griping about their experience with mundane things much less extraordinary ones. I find so little griping about something seemingly extraordinary pretty persuasive. That’s bolstered by the fact that unlike, say, curl or ffmpeg, even as an engineer myself using Chrome constantly I’ve almost never had to care about a single one of its flags.