Having worked at many large companies, I can honestly say that Google was the best behaved company of all of them, by far.
I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees, and they're given a lot of latitude to speak their mind. When something bad happens, everybody hears about it because the employees are the ones shouting it loudest from the rooftops.
Their track record isn't perfect, and Dragonfly particularly strikes a chord with me. But other companies do worse, and you're just much less likely to hear about it.
These beta updates can go through a couple iterations before being released to the public, which is why it seems like there’s a long delay.