The two aren't incompatible. You don't need to take away people's independence and agency to have good leaders. A good leader doesn't need to be authoritarian in order to lead. It's bad leaders who have to force people to follow them.
And just because you want to be agile and flexible doesn't mean you can't plan ahead. You need a little of both.
Having worked in Google like companies they always seem lure talent by dangling tasty projects in front of them. But successful projects at the scale these companies need are few and far between. The talent then starts complaining the company is not nimble enough etc and moves on. One might argue this is the natural order things. One of the reason SV has so many startups. Much of what startups do is likely not that appealing to large companies and far too risky - failing at a high rate.
Back when I was an industry analyst, I still remember a conversation I had with someone at IBM. I don't remember the context and don't quote me on the number but he said something to the effect of "If it doesn't have the potential to be at least a billion dollar business, we're not going to even try."
Basically every project consumes some slice of attention, time, and money up and down the line. You can mitigate this to some degree with decentralization but only up to a point.
There are pros and cons to this but I could also see other companies shipping a small change like the above toy example much much faster.
Ideally they could invest in methods of blast radius protection to speed up the iteration cycle. As I recall, they still allowed teams to get a tiny slice of search traffic diverted to a custom experiment on a custom service without too much overhead.
It's hard to adapt and change flexibly if you're busy dealing with the upshot of yesterday's unforeseen disaster.
It can and does work. But it requires getting over the instinct to control and monitor which, I think, Google will never surpass. I have been saying for years that Google is like a civil service with a small search company attached...the weirdest part is that Google has somehow maintained this fiction internally that their employees are all wonderful entrepreneurs and dynamic whilst they have grown into the tech equivalent of the DMV. Once that process begins, you will never be able to fire enough people to undo it.
Also, bottom-up doesn't work if you don't have good staff. Top-down is about turning average staff (i.e. most Googlers) into something passable. The example of GE is quite good, they empowered lots of their lower-level execs and that was a terrible idea because doing an MBA or GE's exec training does not suddenly turn you into someone who can do good deals.
Bottom up doesnt mean unauthoritarian leaders.