I'm glad you're here talking. This is hard to navigate as an employee. A company as large as Google must make it nearly impossible to anticipate every downstream effect it may have on seemingly unrelated areas of the business.
As an example in this case, I am an IT decision maker for a small group of people, I'm not that active on social media as a contributor, and losing an Apps subscription because of a browser auth decision could be one of those impacts. Its likely not, but if it were it would be impossible to understand in the aggregate, and of infinitesimal impact.
Be that as it may, user PII is now on the liability side of the ledger, and some businesses just haven't adapted to start operating like that is reality. Beyond financial hazard, the moral harm of a leak, the risk of telling the secrets of millions to the world (or a dangerous few) should be of grave concern. The best way to be trustworthy is to not know the secrets in the first place.
Bulk data collection doesn't affect 0.1% of users, that is the only group of people that understand enough to be concerned about. It affects everybody who signed up as a user. Their secrets and their safety are now in your hands.
This IS an engineering problem. I have full faith that with the right will, Google could figure out a way to offer web scale services to all manner of users and still deliver on its ambitions to deliver intelligent experiences with provable privacy at the heart of it. It probably involves data living at the edge; it probably involves renting datums from customers; it definitely involves a radical shift in business models.
Engineering a solution to a privacy-at-scale repository of human knowledge cannot happen without leadership that truly sees privacy as profit, at every level of the company.