The real issue the OP has is that they’re aging and seeing things differently. The Google they remember never existed - it’s just how they felt at the time.
“When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *
There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.
One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.
* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.
I'm not the OP so I can't say for sure, but I consider it a near certainty from my own (similar) experience that he's both viewing his time at google through the rose colored glasses of youth and novelty and is correct about the negative changes to the company's culture.
This is a kind of gaslighting ("Google was always the same, your experience of it in a previous state is irrelevant, you see things that never existed because you're older").
Tons of real world changes have happened to Google, the people, the culture, its reach, its products, its business practices, between 1998 and 2024. Things obvious even to people who weren't there - and of course more obvious to people who have been there, but in any case not things that are subjective as to whether they happened, but concrete things, documented in news reports and press releases, shown in the product line, and so on.
And many of the things that changed between 1998 and 2024, changed in the part between 2010 (when TFA's TB was hired) and 2024.
Similar to how Apple was different in 1977, different in 1984, different in 1992, different in 2000, different in 2008, and different in 2024. That's not some personal subjective hallucination, it's a hard fact.
You can say "Google was good/shit then to be that way, and it's equally good/shit now, even though it has changed in several ways".
But you cannot say "Google was always the same, it's just you 'seeing things' if you see it as having changed", because that's absolutely and objectively wrong.
Or do you have some unique mentalist-style access to the "real source" that drives him?