Parent's comment is mildly revealing in a sense. Management does not want to learn new things. It already thinks it has all the tools needed. It had them ready and polished since 50s and they work so well. So well. And them youngins come in and upset applecart with all that remote work. Stupid pandemic ruined managing.
FWIW, I am exaggerating, but only slightly. I did overhear an actual comment from a manager that they had to 'toss out their toolset' to deal with remote.
However, at a tech company that's targeting an ecosystem that changes every few years, managers that are unwilling / unable to learn new stuff are incredibly damaging to morale and to the business as a whole.
If Google was making widgets that were designed in the 1950's, and have undergone zero customer-visible revisions, then yeah, they'd need conservative managers that can keep cutting costs / defect rates a few percent every year while investing as little as possible in evolving the core business.
However, Google isn't there yet. They're facing an existential threat, where Internet search is going to be lights-out in a few years thanks to LLMs, their primary revenue sources are being outlawed in large swaths of the first world, and they are a distant third in public cloud, which is the thing that's driving economies of scale for server-side compute (meaning they're dangerously close to falling on to the wrong exponential curve when it comes to datacenter hardware innovation).
If a manager can't figure out how to manage via zoom + slack, I seriously doubt they'll be able to figure out how to incorporate non-human intelligence into their team workflows while also pivoting from surveillance capitalism to a privacy-respecting revenue model, and also becoming customer-focused (at Google!! Hahaha!!!) enough to court enterprise customers.
FWIW, I am exaggerating, but only slightly. I did overhear an actual comment from a manager that they had to 'toss out their toolset' to deal with remote.