Before Snowden encryption was something that was mostly seen as a way to protect login forms. People knew it'd be nice to use it for everything but there were difficult technical and capacity/budget problems in the way because SSL was slow.
After Snowden two things happened:
1. Encryption of everything became the companies top priority. Budget became unlimited, other projects were shelved, whole teams were staffed to solve the latency problems. Not only for Google's own public facing web servers but all internal traffic, and they began working explicitly on working out what it'd take to get the entire internet to be encrypted.
2. End-to-end encryption of messengers (a misnomer IMHO but that's what they call it) went from an obscure feature for privacy and crypto nerds to a top priority project for every consumer facing app that took itself seriously.
The result was a massive increase in the amount of traffic that was encrypted. Maybe that would have eventually happened anyway, but it would have been far, far slower without Edward.