By my experience, Google's VPS are faster (it's just comment, so no metrics, sorry) and network is more stable, compared with Linode (same performance per $, worse network) and Digital Ocean (worse performance, stable enough network).
But minimal price of support, $150/month, makes it expensive enough for side-projects, and I think side-projects is the main force of adoption.
Again from my experience: I created managed VM (on Google Cloud Platform) to test it, with "autoscale" setup. After testing, I tried to remove it, removed successfully, but then I noticed I'm still paying for it - instance was recreated, as I suppose, because of "autoscale". I will not pay $150 to solve $11 issue, so I just turned off billing in that project, but I don't think it's cool to don't have even minimal support from hosting, so I'm not sure my next side-project will be hosted on GCP.