Googler here! Opinions are my own.
Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constantly reorganizing, cutting departments and creating new ones. On any given day there may be as many as a hundred employees losing their job and another hundred joining.
To my recollection, since the 2023 layoffs—where >10% of the company was let go and hiring was basically stopped—Google hasn't done anything even remotely similar to this.
That said, a layoff like that can definitely affect company culture for a few years, so yeah, your point is taken there.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...
> Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year ...
https://www.warntracker.com/?company=google
blabla calculate summarize, Google has laid off between 1% and 2% of its employees monthly since "the 12000" (since 2023) on average. Btw: on that page you can also see that "the 12000" is a misnomer and it was closer to 20000 individuals.
If the total number of employees is going up (as you say, it is) then the obvious explanation is that there must be a massive move underway moving headcount from one location to another ...