Google has really been dropping the ball a lot more publicly lately

Here's the thing, Google has changed. Over time, they've restructured themselves, initially purposefully, but now they're facing the consequences of that.

Google genuinely does still have amazing programmers and engineers.

The trouble is that their expertise is in crafting systems that harvest personal information; expertise in other areas has been left to rot because there's no point in improving them.

Gmail is already entrenched, as is search, YouTube, maps, android, etc.

They aren't going to attract a significant amount more customers, so their main avenue for continued growth has been to become better at harvesting and processing data.

For a while that was fine, but now that this expertise has been lost, Google can't make good products. They don't have the ability to do so, it's not that they don't want people to use their software and think "wow this is actually pretty great", it's that they genuinely can't do it anymore. Not unless the product you want is a telemetry system, in which case I doubt you'll find anybody that can do such a stellar job.

It's a part of why Google starts then kills so many projects. They want to expand to collect more data, but they don't have the ability to create good services anymore, so it just ends up being an advanced data collector with a sub-par app/website on top of it. The company just isn't structured to make things in any other way.