This does not appear that crazy to me. In fact, today it's almost a recommended practice for large web applications and it's called "tree shaking". ECMAScript modules are inlined into the same scope. It makes the JIT work easier because it now works with symbols instead of `require(foo).bar` calls to speculate on. It makes most web apps run better, both in bandwidth and compute.

It's very likely to have affected users on other websites, but Google is a common denominator for debugging.

My uneducated guess: they're using the Google Closure Compiler to make smaller JavaScript bundles. It saves some bandwidth and allows for better optimizations. It seems like a reasonable engineering decision to ensure product decisions don't affect the user experience too negatively, something a lot of us are familiar with..