Corporate leaders set stretch goals all the time -- that's part of their job. Not meeting them just means certain VP's might not get their full million-dollar bonuses -- not that a billions-dollar business will shutter and lay off 1000's of people.
In a large company, sure, but in Google? They nuke their own stuff all the time, users be damned. Since AWS offers a larger ecosystem, and doesn't have the Google product TTL of like 5 years, I really don't know why anyone would use GCP unless they're going for multi-provider redundancy
Tired and bad meme is tired and bad. Why would prior evidence of Google shutting down things that are not anything like GCP suggest that Google would shut down things that are like GCP?
Most of the google products that have been shut down that HN loves to harp about were shut down not because they failed to reach some sort of goal, but because they had no goals at all. They are by and large the work of a few people and nobody felt like maintaining them. The one exception is Google+, which notably unlike Google Cloud didn't require spending billions of dollars on datacenters and undersea cables, or on hiring/diverting thousands and thousands of engineers. Nor did it require building a third-party partner ecosystem and signing long term contracts with deprecation windows. Nor did it have a projected total market revenue larger than all digital advertising.
There wasn't, i.e. the thread existed, but the purported discussion of shutting down GCP did not occur as written. But don't take my word for it, take the word of Corey Quinn, the AWS consultant who originally invented the meme that Google might someday shut down GCP.