You're right, pg should have spoken out against Palantir when Biden was in charge too. Just because he's right about them now doesn't mean he was always right about them and we should keep that in mind.
In short, the W3C adopted it because they thought it was a good idea, while browsers and screen readers both refused to adopt it for various reasons like ambiguity with existing web content or concerns about screen readers having to implement and maintain their own independent outline algorithm implementations. 8 years and an entire standards organization after the thread above, the WHATWG finally dropped it.
The APA even removed sex addiction from the DSM-V, which isn't the end-all-be-all of what is or isn't a mental disorder, but is indicative of how science has broadly rejected the idea of sex addiction being a meaningful disorder.
This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism.
People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now.
No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.
My boss is the sysadmin for my school's CS department; there is an IT department that every other department uses, but they're slow and useless.
For the longest time, their servers were named after ships, such as Bismark, Arizona, Enterprise, etc, while all of our servers were named after things that sink ships, such as Broadside, Salvo, Crash, Leak, etc.