This is Google's general strategy for dealing with any controversy surrounding web standards, not just the big ones around ad blocking. The first thing that they will always say is, "critics don't understand what we're trying to do and they're unknowledgeable about the spec and there's a lot of misinformation floating around..."
Literally any controversy about a standard that Chrome adopts, that will always be the first thing that Google says. It's just a standard pattern.
Being able to say, "I understand people's concerns and I have concerns and we need to have a conversation and iterate but it's just hard with all this misinformation floating around" allows Google to position themselves as a reasonable party while also allowing them to completely ignore any criticism that is inconvenient because they just lump it into the misinformation category.
If the gaslighting doesn't work, Google's next step will be to talk about how the debate has spiraled out of control and how everyone needs to "remember the human." If that doesn't work, they'll lock down and refuse to talk to critics and then plead with critics to be patient because "we're working on it."
Then they'll make some minor changes to the spec and claim that everyone's criticisms are outdated and go back to the gaslighting again. That's already happened here, the original spec did not mandate hold-backs, in fact it suggested that hold-backs were not a desirable solution to pursue. Now all of a sudden it's, "why is everyone so mad, don't they know we have hold-backs?"
If everything falls apart and Google has to backtrack, the closest thing that you'll get to an apology from Google is that "we need to be better about communicating with users/developers." It's not that anything was wrong, it was that the web standards teams just weren't able to communicate how right they were.
And then we'll repeat the process with whatever the next controversy is.
----
I wrote a little bit about this process back in 2018 when web audio was the controversy (a comparatively minor browser change with very few privacy implications): https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay and I keep paying attention to how Chrome approaches controversy, and it's pretty much always following this pattern, it's wild how consistently this has played out with Manifest V3, FLOC, Topics, etc, etc...
Developers and users should get better at recognizing this stuff during debates about Google policy, and they should go into conversations with the Chromium team about web standard controversies expecting that they will play out this way.