You are in an echo-chamber.
There isn't much negative opinion of Google, Paypal, Stripe and other companies hated by HN commenters outside of HN, even in technical communities.
As soon as there was an alternative, everyone piled on.
There was an army trying to passively-aggressively harm Microsoft in everything it did, and it mattered. If there was ever a gray area where Microsoft wasn't the obvious choice, people decided the opposite way.
Google is gradually becoming the next Microsoft.
It's not even dislike, so much as well-founded distrust. Each time I've done business with Google, I came out behind for it at the end, because I was treated as a statistic. Google would gladly take out my business for their convenience if it didn't impact their bottom line. It wasn't malicious, like Microsoft, but just apathetic.
At this point, it's left behind enough victims among decision-makers that GCP is permanently kneecapped in the race with AWS, Azure, etc.
Microsoft was the butt of the joke of literally everyone that had every used a computer. There were countless memes about how bad Windows was, made by people with 0 technical literacy. Your grandma had probably heard about Windows Vista sucking, despite not knowing what it was.
Almost nobody outside of HN has a similar experience with Google products.
You are in the same echo-chamber as the original commenter.
YouTube's algorithm and recommendations are both memes and well analyzed in popular media, and people who have only ever used phones and iPads know to add "reddit" to their search terms to sort through the garbage Google would show them otherwise.
There are also office workers and consumers who have been burned by adopting Google services, like workplaces that adopted Google products for chat and voice/video, or by buying Nest products or investing in Stadia.
This statement is imprecise. Youtube creators, for example, hold a similar view.
Grandma doesn't make decisions about what cloud platform to use, or where to host content. Among key decision-makers, distrust of Google is widespread.
Google will do fine in search (at least until / unless it's disrupted by Bing or DDG), Android, email, and in other consumer products. Where this will eventually kill Google is in B2B: GCP, Google Workspace, etc.
I think the fact that they are called "Youtube creators" and not "Video creators" highlights how weak the argument is.
But there's no single problem that's a trigger for all, not everyone is upset about the same thing and I don't agree that Reader, or the NSA, or any other single issue singlehandedly turned everyone against Google or other tech companies. It's the whole environment, and different straws broke different camels' backs.
Doesn't matter. An echo-chamber that your target demographic frequents can be just as damaging to your overall reputation if not more.
Source: Someone currently working in government IT procurement who is literally in charge of evaluating cloud-based products (hi, google!).
Also funny you mention Paypal and Stripe: At my last job, we chose to go with traditional payment processors in large part because of how frequent stories about Paypal and Stripe screwing legitimate companies pop up.
Even popular science and tech press is highly critical of Google, and no longer just publishes the company's press releases with gushing endorsement.
Back in like 2014, I agreed with your sentiment and even said the same thing myself. Back then, popular sentiment towards Google was very positive and there was a lot of excitement, but generally, the nerdier someone was when it came to computers, the more likely they were to be at least critical of Google if not hostile towards them.
Now it's different and people are looking at Google like they look at Facebook or Comcast.