[Rathseg]

It wasn't a matter of lack of trust. Oddly, the article kind of refutes itself by providing plenty of examples of it just being a bad product.

Stadia was a solution in search of a problem. No one wanted it and it wasn't a good product. It was also a case of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Google did everything in the cloud and already had cloud compute services that were good technically but under utilized because of Google's low-touch business models. Add in the appeal of that sweet, sweet recurring revenue model that drives the MBA types wild and it became very easy rationalize that it was a good idea. They likely never considered if it was going to be appealing to gamers or to developers because they were blinded by their their own desires.