Apologies if what I say is naive -- I don't follow Google announcements at all -- but they don't seem to try and progress any field per se, except maybe deep learning and only where it serves them (like one of their first successes was to reduce their power usage on a ship full of servers I think?).
They are merging YouTube Gaming to YT itself (cited branding problems), discontinuing Inbox next March... Add that to a long list of canceled services. I am not saying they have to run a charity but they do seem very heavy-handed in these situations.
And so far we have not seen them innovate anywhere for a while -- correct me if I am wrong.
To me, it seems they entrench themselves even further in the business of using personal data for profit -- one example could be the upcoming laptop OS Fuchsia. Imagine how much more they will know about people if that takes off on a massive scale.
They do have lots of ancillary revenue streams, but when you're talking about 100s of billions from ads then they just get overshadowed completely. Very hard to build an equivalently sized business in any other sector.
The major now seems to be on Google Cloud, but they have struggled there with bad marketing, lack of sales and support talent, and strange priorities. Seems to be growing now with the AI functionalities but there's a long road ahead.
The very example you cite at the end is an example of them genuinely innovating and advancing the field. Have you read the Fuchsia docs (https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/README.md)? It's spearheading several innovative OS concepts and I'm excited to see it develop (to name three: microkernel architecture, top to bottom least-privilege access sandboxing, and Flutter for the UI which advances UI development in other ways).
Google Compute Engine, and their infrastructure offerings more generally, are in a nice spot relative to Amazon and Microsoft. AWS and Azure get all the attention, but I wouldn't be surprised if GCE is decently profitable as well.
Like sibling commentors have pointed out, it's easy for even relatively successful ventures to be completely overshadowed by the golden goose that is ads and search.
