It seems to me that all of google's most successful services (search, youtube, gmail and gsuite, maps/earth, android) are next to impossible to monetize profitably and have significant utility to the general public. It feels like these are services that governments should be building and funding themselves.

Youtube specifically has a plethora of useful information made by normal people. You can find hundreds of thousands of videos, in most languages, about doing most basic and complex repairs for almost any model of car made in the last few decades, for example. It is essentially a giant public library.