That's like staffing a single-manager team on a bad project for a year. Which I assure you happens all the time in big companies, and yet they survive.
I think there might be a disagreement about what "big" means. Google can easily afford to sink millions each year into pointless endeavours without going out of business and they probably have. Alphabet's annual revenue has been growing a good 10% each year since 2021[0]. That's in the range of $20-$30 billion dollars with a B.
To put that into perspective, Alphabet's revenue has increased 13.38% year-over-year as of June 30, arriving at $328.284 billion dollars - i.e. it has increased by $38.74 billion in that time. A $10 million dollar mistake translates to losing 0.0258% of that number.
A $10 million dollar mistake costs Alphabet 0.0258% of the amount their revenue increased year-over-year as of last month. Alphabet could have afforded to make 40 such $10 million dollar mistakes in that period and it would have only represented a loss of 1% of the year-over-year increase in revenue. Taking the year-over-year increase down by 1% (from 13.38% to 12.38%) would have required making 290 such $10 million dollar mistakes within one year.
Let me repeat that because it bears emphasizing: over the past years, every year Google could have easily afforded an additional 200 such $10 million dollar mistakes without significantly impacting their increase in revenue - and even in 2022 when inflation was almost double what it was in the other year they would have still come out ahead of inflation.
So in terms of numbers this is demonstrably false. Of course the existence of repeated $10 million dollar mistakes may suggest the existence of structural issues that will result in $1, $10 or $100 billion dollar problems eventually and sink the company. But that's conjecture at this point.
The point the parent made is not to not make mistakes, but to learn from them. Which they probably did not from all of them, as indicated by the sheer amount of messenger apps on this list, but there's definitely a lot to learn from this list.
To be clear: what I mean by "not learning the right lessons" is a company deciding that the issue with wasting $10M in six months is that they didn't do it 100x in parallel in three months. Then when that goes wrong they must need to do it 100x wider in parallel again in three weeks.
I'm not really certain that's true at Google's size. Their annual revenue is something like a quarter trillion dollars. 25,000x larger than a $10m mistake.
The equivalent wastage for a self-employed person would be allowing a few cups of Starbucks coffee per year to go cold.