He mentioned that he worked in DevRel and making open source tools like this was a common thing they did: https://x.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069535183158812698

I don't know the legal situation, so maybe they felt like they had to do this to not face liability of some sort, but this feels like the wrong outcome vs e.g. having engineers rewrite it from scratch or move it to a less obviously google affiliated place.

You shouldn't use your employer's branding for unsanctioned projects, so Google is certainly well within their rights, but I think this is unnecessarily conservative vs someone who was trying to promote the employer's mission/products.

DevRel does generally get free reign to post stuff to github all the time. Many teams and projects do not have to comply with the standardized open source releasing process.