As someone two years into working at Google this resonates hard and has absolutely been my experience as an engineer there too. It's certainly not the culture I was expecting for sure.

Longer-time Googler here. We went blindingly fast from "A few engineers decide to use the most powerful computing cluster in the world to make a meme generator because it would be a cool project" to "Let's have a sync meeting with 15 people, including five managers, to discuss buying a $20,000 test instrument, which will need to be approved by four directors, three of whom are OOO for the next two months."