I think many companies would keep that kinda stuff internal, though. Google just allows them all to be published publicly and then killed off a few months later. There is really no good reason for 14 different Google chat apps to have become a public meme.
And the person that created the product that was canned because nobody used it goes to the new team with their reputation intact and the company ready to give them more money?
Yes. Performance reviews are short-term focused, so by the time the bureaucracy gets around to formally cancelling your old project, it will have probably forgotten that you were the one who created it.
Add to that a healthy dose of toxic positivity and "blameless postmortem" culture, and the fact that you created the product can actually still be used as a good thing on your CV. You did fantastic work! The product was flawless! It just happened to be a total failure for... some unrelated reason. "Shifting business priorities", maybe, or "unforeseeable macroeconomic conditions".
Plenty of projects don't get launched to begin with. The ability to "launch" a project is looked at favorably in general. Maybe too favorable, but that's another discussion. If you are someone who is known to be able to deliver a "launch" that's big on your CV in most companies. Believe it or not, in big companies many project never quite reach a minimal viable product status to begin with.
Moreover, the canning of a project might have plethora of reasons, not all of them are even technical or have anything to reflect on the people that worked on it.
To my understanding a lot of these managers aren't sticking with the product too far after launch, they're often moving on internally to the next thing. So these managers get to say they were responsible for launching something new, and get to wash their hands of what happens after.
You'd think after all this time senior management, both internal and external, would see through this charade, but that is not apparently the case.
And of course the next guy won't get promo for maintaining the last guy's thing, so he's incentivized to nuke it and build his own shiny thing.
This can be observed in any large company though, not just Google.