I think your comment about "not coercive" is insightful. The biggest change I've seen over time here is that at the start, people never talked about what users should or should not do. They were treated as people who would use our products, or not, and that was A-OK.
The subtle trend that underlies a lot of this recent outpouring of dismay is that these days, this view has changed. It's not about chasing profit (it's still extremely rare at Google to see anything approaching a budget). It's not about being evil. It's that these days users are increasingly treated as if they were sheep that need to be herded around.
This trend is evidence in many different ways. The big push for Google+ comes from Larry's fear of Facebook. He got really scared a few years ago that Facebook was going to "win" in any area they competed in, simply through being social, regardless of how good their actual product was. Photos was taken as the canonical example: Facebook Photos was inferior in almost every way to PicasaWeb but it won handily in terms of market share because it was social (or so the theory goes). Messaging seemed similar, surveys showed the younger generation didn't use email anymore, it was all on Facebook. So at the time it was thought that Facebook were going to take on every one of Google's core products and win, simply through having the social graph. So that fear drove the massive investment in Google+ and the desire to win at any cost.
Of course this strategy has not worked, as was predictable. Google+ is an excellent social network, but people already had one and didn't care to change. Also, the threat from Facebook has never really seemed to materialise in the huge way Larry thought it would.
Unfortunately this fear drove a long series of mental rationalisations. People would use Google+, employees were told, because it would be good for them. They might not realise it now, but Google+ would make everything better, and that's why it's so important that they all sign up. Real Names might be unpopular to start with, but then people would realise the benefits and they'd all be happy.
The same thinking has driven a bunch of other problems. That damn red alerting bell that Google+ users all get? It can't be switched off, rationale: "if we allow users to switch it off because it's too noisy, after we fix that they won't switch it back on and then they'd end up in a worse state. It's really better for people in the long term that there be no way to disable it".
Unfortunately Larry is so committed to this fear-driven social strategy that he can't mentally accept that a large population of users is never going to be excited about or use Google+. For him, if Google+ loses, Google itself will become entirely irrelevant a short time later. It's literally an existential crisis. This places Vic in a very powerful position where he's able to get whatever he wants, and pushback from the lower ranks is ignored in order to seem to be making progress with this "better for the users" social integration.
I guess YouTube comments are a good recent example of this. Presumably someone at the bottom of the YouTube org understood that removing character limits and allowing links would immediately cause floods of spam, but the "social is better" meme is now so unmoveable amongst management that these sorts of practical considerations (which would once have been the dominant factor in decision making) get tossed aside.
I don't know if Google will change, but unless Larry wakes up and realises Facebook isn't going to kill his business, I think it will continue down the current path for a long time yet.