It would have better to say Google popularized these practices rather than pioneered them. Or at least, that these practices became much more widespread among tech companies after Google's IPO in 2004 than beforehand.
I think it's also safe to say that Google's culture was strikingly different from other tech companies of its era, as has been well documented in a few books.
This also seems incorrect. Before Google, it was common to have company-provided before Google. IBM and Motorola had cafeterias. I don't know when AMD installed their cafeterias, but if it was post-Google, it would've been inspired by IBM and Moto's cafeteria and not Google's. In Austin, the Moto cafeteria was known for having very good food and IBM was moderately subsidized and pretty good until the 2010s, which doesn't line up with Google being influential at all. And Centaur had great, free, food. This is an old idea that predates tech companies that a lot of tech companies have picked up that Google also happened to pick up.
As a term, dogfooding spread through Microsoft after Paul Maritz wrote an emailed titled "Eating our own Dogfood" in 1988. If the term was popularized by anyone, it was probably Joel Spolsky who took the practice from Microsoft and blogged about it when he was the most widely read programming blogger. But there are a lot of examples of people doing this before Martiz's email (they just called it something else) and before tech companies even existed; this is another practice that predates tech companies that tech companies picked up.
I don't know about the history of A/B testing in tech, but Capital One was doing A/B tests at scale before they would've been influenced by Google and that's another idea that was used outside of tech.
As far as I know, Google was one of the first to offer food that was tasty enough, healthy enough, and cheap enough (free!) that nearly everyone ate at the company cafes on a daily basis.
I've heard from people who stayed at IBM that the food declined to cafeteria food quality over the next ten years, which led to the cafeteria basically being abandoned because people ate out so much. But that's actually counter to the narrative in the post — IBM had decent food before Google, and then some time after Google's IPO, the food declined to became standard cafeteria food.
For a while, another building was notorious for serving sushi but only admitted their Android developers, because Andy Rubin was paying for that himself.
I've never had free food routinely except customer briefing center or some other lunchtime work function. Rarely went out unless it were a short walk. (The brief time I worked in downtown Boston with no cafeteria is pretty much the only time I went out for lunch routinely.)
Per another comment, my sense is that brown bag lunches used to be more common and most people stopped doing that.
Some hardcore eaters in Austin.
I'm not sure that was popular, though (as in something the majority of the population believed in). Grandma in Poducksville almost certainly had no idea. She would have known about Google doing the same, though, as it was blasted all over the news constantly for a while.
Edit: I don’t want to be harsh on you, but the fundamental problem of credibility, especially in online writing, is that it takes one mistake to lose an amount that takes hundreds of correct decision in a row to regain…