The promotion thing seems severely overstated. At the higher levels for IC and management this is basically how all tech companies that build products are run. But you don't see this said about Microsoft or Amazon, even though they also have hundreds of new features and discrete new products per year.
My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.
I think it's because Google has created an insular, navel-gazing culture that is excessively engineer driven rather than customer driven, to the extent of thinking people not at Google are just inferior.
My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.