[bonoboTP]

It's a meme now that Google doesn't support anything long term and breaks compatibility etc. all the time. Why? Because that's what's incentivized for the engineers and managers. You climb the career ladder by releasing new stuff. Supporting old stuff is a dead end careerwise. If that's the culture, this is what you get. On the whole, it does seem to work out well for them!

[drusepth]

It's also just kind of the natural outcome of any company that has literally thousands of "product" lines. Some work, some don't, and some become less and less important to support over time for a myriad of different reasons.

Small businesses with fewer products are arguably more incentivized to ensure each product lasts long-term, but it's not uncommon to see them moving on from product to product, too. They just have far fewer in total to see "Google ends yet another product!"-esque headlines about.

[kohlerm]

monorepo culture, everyone needs to use the latest and "greatest"