"we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google"
The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google".
This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue with that.
Again, I read it differently. It sounded more like a pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may be being uncharitable.
If you want to keep a company of hundreds or thousands people following some rule, really the only way is if you create processes that check and force that. There is no way to keep company following privacy rules (as weak as they are) without company wide protocol and insistence on it.
Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.