I worked at Cruise (I left about 2.5 years ago) and I have the opposite impression about Kyle. Kyle was a very charismatic leader who was really in the trenches. Unlike a lot of CEOs he was really visible in the office, he would drop in on meetings if he had breaks in his calendar, he was active on Jira and Slack, etc. Even though I was just a rank-and-file engineer I was in a number of meetings with him and some of the engineers would meet with him often. It was pretty clear that he had his finger on the pulse of the company and understood what was going on in engineering in a pretty deep way.
Some of these are qualities that I could see leading to someone thinking he was "aimless" or a "confused mess", but these are also things that engender a lot of respect from employees. For better or worse his presence was very much felt by engineers, and I think everyone thought that he was very technical.
I think Kyle's departure is going to hit hard for a lot of the engineers working on onboard software. It's been reported that they are spending something like $250M/quarter so in order to keep the ship afloat they are going to need to raise funding soon. It's hard to think of a worse situation they could be fundraising in, which I assume is going to mean a massive down round, which is going to further dishearten the people working there.