These robots are a research platform for solving many tasks. There's no point in comparing them to industrial, stationary robots in a recycling facility. It's like comparing a smartphone camera to a fax machine.
Google should have cut this earlier and kept Boston Dynamics instead. I mean it's cool work but my opinion is that general AI advancements are going to dramatically change how all this is done in pretty short order. Meanwhile the hardware side of things is in need of way more investment, and that investment won't be obsoleted as the software improves, in fact quite the opposite. The investment will pay off in spades when the software suddenly becomes able to do many more tasks given a capable body. Google was too impatient to keep investing in hardware until the software was ready.
I'm not sure this is a great comparison: smartphones with their cameras have, in practice, absolutely made fax machines (and most flatbed scanners) completely obsolete. People use smartphone cameras all the time to take photos of documents. I've read Apple even has an iPhone function that automatically creates PDFs out of photographed documents; there's surely other apps that do the same. By contrast, no one except dinosaurs still use fax machines.
In theory, specialized, task-specific robots in a robotics facility would be superior in performance to any kind of general-purpose robot for sorting tasks in a recycling center, and research on general-purpose robots can be applied to improving specialized robots. But there is no corresponding case for fax machines; they're truly dead and obsolete.