Up and out: launch something, get promoted, move onto the next team, what happens afterwards is the next guy's problem.

And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.

This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.

Plenty of projects don't get launched to begin with. The ability to "launch" a project is looked at favorably in general. Maybe too favorable, but that's another discussion. If you are someone who is known to be able to deliver a "launch" that's big on your CV in most companies. Believe it or not, in big companies many project never quite reach a minimal viable product status to begin with.

Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.

To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.

You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.