Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry, this is nonsense. Technical reports exist to fill in information that is useful for readers but not necessary to understand the key contributions of the work, and/or that don't fit within the journal or conference's page limit. I'm not sure where you got the idea that it is something people do to avoid competitive baselines; IME, the peer-reviewed portion of the publication is far more likely to contain mi…
I agree that's what TR's are for. However, my point is, if you want to publish academic writing without peer review, a TR is a way to go about that. You can also just publish a preprint somewhere, which - surprise surprise - is also common for these same actors. I should have worded it better, in hindsight.
This is (IMO) quite different from, e.g., the cases of academics publishing misleading benchmarks, which is more often just being wedded to a bad idea because you spent years of work on it and your position is at risk if you didn't end up outperforming existing approaches. Often I can still get a lot out of papers with misleading benchmarks, even if what I get is "don't try this technique, it doesn't work." Whereas I frequently get nothing at all out of Google publications. If I had to describe the way Google seems to view academic publishing in one word, it would be "marketing"--it's advertising for people to either come work at Google or use their products, not something written with the intent of advancing the wider state of the art, or even the less noble goal justifying the time and money they put into whatever they're writing about.