I hope it helps them. At my company, there were efforts to compartmentalize our web application to make it more scalable for adding more features inside it. I left before I saw this effort in action, but the principles it was based on were solid. I believe some applications could be compartmentalized so that adding more features/teams would bring more value (without making it worse) however, I might be wrong.
As others have noticed, this is not a new move. For the past several years I've been accessing Google Maps simply by typing in maps.google.com and it has always redirected me to google.com/maps.