It's not just investors, Google is the quintessential example of a company that has taken metric based decision making too far. Everyone in the organisation has metrics to meet, and those KPIs affect promotions and pay. If your KPIs are entirely driven by revenue/profit it distorts the decision making of everyone and focuses on what large impact an individual or team can make to their bottom line, no mater what the collateral is.
This is I think a good example of that in action.
Another is the Google Domains shutdown. Domain names are a low margin commodity market, with a lot of competition. Someone somewhere in Google decided that for their own personal metrics selling the product was good for them. Removing a fairly thinly profitable team, and at the same time a windfall generated by them personally. It clearly should have been treated as an important value add for UX.
I do believe the penny is dropping and advertisers are beginning to see just how little Google cares about how well they are doing. As long as you continue to spend more, Google are happy, even if I'm you are making less yourself. Your advertising rep isn't their to help you improve your ads and make them more cost effective, they are there to extract more of your margin from you.