Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
Google is already failing to provide the Pixel kernel drivers in the preferred form for modification. Their kernel build system uses Git commands but yet they aren't providing the Git repositories it expects to be there. They had to provide a repo metadata file as a workaround but it's not the same since the revisions of the code aren't set properly in the resulting build.
Google is arguably already violating the GPL. They're deliberately making it inconvenient and are adding deliberate delays through requiring manual handling of the requests.