(Speaking only for myself, I just watch from the sidelines and have no involvement)
This seems like Google’s response to
1. Rust not being sufficiently “Go-like” (in the sense of the “The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers” quote) where C++ lets a bunch of people who are not really experts in the language write footguns that Google has to deal with when they cause problems at scale. They want a dumbed-down language (some would use words like approachable/safer/whatever here) for them so nobody will send in CLs with ”clever” code that causes headaches later. I guess they’ll need to have generics but I’m guessing that choices will be made to avoid introducing advanced type theory, functional programming, etc into the language.
2. Google uses C++ differently than everyone else who uses C++. In particular, they have a lot of statically linked code from a monorepo that gets recompiled all the time. This has caused them to put up proposals to “fix” the language that nobody else will support and don’t get adopted, because they break the ABI or backwards compatibility in ways that are unacceptable to the others who participate. It seems like this language is the result of that frustration and subsequent soft-withdrawal from the C++ WG.
I haven’t looked at the design much yet beyond just the simple examples and I think it mostly looks reasonable, but I feel like Google designed this to solve their problems with C++ and is just throwing it out there if people are willing to adopt it because it’s there and Google says it’s good, just like how Go gained traction. Sometimes Google does make good things :) Some Go developers would say that about Go, I’m sure. But if you’re using this, it seems pretty clear that the needs of this will be driven by Google, and the above two points are probably things you should keep in mind as you watch it evolve.