Individual contributors at Google are not making these decisions. It's the CEO and upper management that decide not to fund customer support teams and to adopt morally dubious policies.
The individual contributors are part of it though. If they walk and cannot be replaced, policies have to change. They are pretty much the best pressure point there is to get Google to move on something if you're not representing a large amount of shares.
Sure, but if you subscribe to the idea that Google is hiring "the best and the brightest" and couldn't pull off a lot of the hard tech if they just had five times the number of average CS majors, that situation changes very quickly, because the pool of people to replace them from shrinks dramatically.
It's not that they couldn't replace them, it's just a lot cheaper to change some policies. If you're threatened with half your R&D staff walking out over some project in China, how hard is that decision, really?
Imho, the problem is that Googlers are paid a lot of money to not care, and that works pretty well.
