We should ignore the word of one of the company's earliest employees, who worked there for over a decade and became a VP just because she no longer works there?
Yes, because context is key. In that statement she was attempting to craft Yahoo!'s work culture as it's CEO.
In contrast, I've been at Google since 2006 and have been utilizing 20% time since I started, and other Googlers here echo the same experience, and many of our projects are publicly available.
Not sure how her statement jives with the experience and artifacts of other's work other than to say it's not correct, and shaped by the context of the statement.
Google employs over 100K people. With that many people there are statistically going to be people with the most amazing and dreadful experiences of working at the place - none of them representative.
Well. They are representative of a wide variety of different work cultures within Google. And if one were to join it would depend on the team/manager one ends up with what part of the stories told would be representative to you.
As always in big corporations there is no one culture, but an amalgamation of many different subcultures. They can have a shared core, but even that becomes more unlikely the more a company grows. At least in my experience.