My hunch is Google is trying to integrate a fast and relatively cheap AI across search and every other surface of their product suite. And for that objective, a model that can move faster while being accurate and cheap enough is more important to them than producing a frontier class heavyweight model.
This. Give me cheap tokens that produce accurate information and the deal is done
I've found that having good source material (markdown, dependency source, search results for agents) for the models to draw on significantly improves information accuracy. Definitely worth investing in this side of "harness engineering", don't rely on facts burned into weights