Dead wrong.

Google's terrible at UX. I once spent about five full minutes figuring out how to navigate my dad's phone app on his Android phone, so I could help him use it, after an OS upgrade. There were some tabs that didn't look like tabs and didn't indicate which was active, turns out. He'd have had no hope of figuring it out on his own.

Once was helping my grandma add contacts in Gmail. She had failed repeatedly. Kept hitting "add contact" and it'd blank the form she was on, without adding the contact. This was because there were two same-color-and-weight add-contact buttons on the page, with the same copy, and one submitted the form, while the other gave you a blank contact form. You pretty much had to be familiar with how HTML nesting worked to have good shot at guessing which was the one you wanted, just by looking at it.

That second one's an older version of the UI, but holy shit it was bad. They definitely make mistakes, and really obvious ones at that. Money and "smart" doesn't mean shit.

One important caveat: Defining good UX is subjective. Ensuring the user has the best possible experience using the product how they want to use it is very different from ensuring they have the best possible experience using the products how the company wants them to use it. I agree that they're not likely making many technical design mistakes in implementing their strategies, but whether or not it yields "good UX" depends on if you're willing to accept the X boundaries applied by the company as "good." You can have a seamless, perfectly implemented, smooth and appealing process that leads users into a dark pattern pushing them towards an action that doesn't work in their best interest: great UX work from the company marketing perspective, shitty from the user perspective.

I read GP as saying they intentionally make the UX dysfunction for actually features (e.g. privacy settings, finding the “most recent” feed - I didn’t even bother to look for that one recently), and only optimize for eyeballs on the main feed and therefor monetization.