> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?

Plenty of times. Perhaps the worse is pushing Manifest v3 with no support for real ad blockers in Chrome. Not to mention no support for ad blockers in Chrome mobile.

Also, their stealing of newspaper content.

Their new push for AI summaries instead of actual search in their search product, stealing even more clicks from sites that actually produce information.

YouTube pushing Shorts to everyone, and now the weird text posts that you can't hide.

In general their gigantic push for ads everywhere all of the time.