I worked at Google for 10 years (2011-2021) and I don't remember a single time where it didn't feel slow and bureaucratic. Compared to the smaller companies and startups I worked at before. Maybe it's not slow compared to academia or other BigCorps where many other Googlers came from though.
Getting anything done always involved going through piles of "paperwork". Getting in the right MDB/Ganpati groups, finding the right persons to put on code reviews, juggling multiple code reviews at a time in order to make progress because your code reviews are just sitting in someone's review queue, "readability" reviews, applying to get readability, mandatory security reviews, design docs for the smallest features, going through rigorous launch processes, etc.
It all made sense in the context of the kinds of production environments Google has, but it was often applied intensely even for very small pieces of work.
On top of that, going through all that and having the paper trail for it was intimately tied to need to build paperwork for going through the perf & promo process, too. So it was entirely built into the culture there.
Also, if there was any interesting work, if you weren't some sort of political beast or very assertive, somebody would just steal it from you before you could do it anyways.
(Oh, and over half the people you met came directly from academia anyways, and so of course they were used to this kind of crap, because that kind of "defend your work", publish-or-perish, and showboating culture is all over academia.)
Has Google gotten slower over time? Maybe? It was sure bloody slow during COVID WFH.
What did get worse overtime was shitty bureaucratic organizational politics. Or what I'd call "shipping the org chart." Customer impacting decisions clearly made because of the structure of various product areas and organizational empires. Especially in the world of things that were outside of Core/Search/Ads and were consumer facing. Terrible.
Working at Google is a good way to learn about infrastructure at scale and make a lot of money. That's about it. The best career at Google is SRE. I wouldn't recommend a SWE career there.