Also is it a bad thing if it is happening? Will it slow progress or is it giving the rest on the industry an opportunity to catch its collective breath if the hype train slows down?
Firefox's servo research project team was laid off in 2020, and the servo project was branched completely into its own thing. The servo project is still up and kicking with plans for 2023 though.
The layoffs will certainly have an impact, but hopefully nothing substantial
Search, Gmail, Maps, Chrome and Android are probably safe. Everything else can be killed at any point in tine.
Like I said, Google's never killing of Keep.
A lot of these changes came with Pichai, his ethos for google seems to be to turn it into another Microsoft; Microsoft is fine, but we already have one of those. It was better when we also had a google that was true to its founding ideology... everything went downhill since that g became uppercase.
I think we can all agree on search.
Maps, Android, Chrome & YouTube would be very unlikely. Adsense too but maybe if they needed to avoid anti-trust .
Docs, drive and Gmail, probably not but I wouldn't say never.
The rest, Id say could go on the right whim of cost cutting.
I just learned about Servo and Fuchsia, and they look interesting.
Edit: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive
Even after Google laid off a huge number of staff one investment company wrote to them saying that average comp was too high and Google should reduce stock grants - of course this was an investor who probably earned 1mn+ complaining people earning 300,000 were earning too much