Yes this is correct. The primary difference in at will employment is that I also am not required to give my employer notice, whereas in the countries you mentioned I am.
I think that's a balanced view. The fact is, Google might have constructively dismissed her because of her history and attitude and they knew if they outright fired her, it would be a PR nightmare. Letting her resign like this makes it much more complex and doesn't open them up to any serious threat of litigation.
She can try to sue them, but now that she made it public it's quite unlikely any court would look at it.
All in all, it's obvious Google didn't follow their own supposed research protocols, but this whole thing is much more complex and I think it has very little to do with her paper.
I absolutely hate my workplace. But I've hated most of the other workplaces I've been at. My ideal situation would be to work at NASA, but I've heard some questionable things about that workplace too. Point is, unless you run the show, you have little control over the culture and something will always suck because humans are individuals and not all of us like conforming. So, I just suck it up and work so I can live. Maybe one day I can do my own thing and establish the culture, but I have to be willing to sacrifice and do what it takes to build a successful business. My guess is that if I do that I might just end up becoming the very thing I hate. It's easy to be morally superior when I have nothing on the line.
Or more likely, the corps realize that the walkouts are an ineffective form of virtue signaling and it would be a PR nightmare to do anything about them, so might as well let them happen since they really mean very little.
This is just not how employment works, really anywhere in the world. The company is well within it's right to ask you to leave earlier to protect it's IP.
Unfortunately, it's clearly more complex than that. To be fair, it seems that she has made it about that to an extent and media ran with it. We haven't heard from google or her superiors. It's clear they didn't agree but to what extent? And why did she need to publicly quit? Again, she quit. She wasn't asked to leave or resign. She volunteered to do so because she had a moral disagreement with the company. And that's fair. We don't really know if she was treated fairly or unfairly just her claims of what happened.
As much as I support employment rights, you are paid by a company to do their bidding. If you don't like it start a company, but then you're just doing the bidding of the customer.
There are so many avenues to lead generation that Mint can take that would also benefit the consumer that they just choose not to take. A simple one could be helping me optimize which credit card products I have to maximize my rewards. Another is offering an API to mint to allow developers to build out plugins and tools. Mint really has an opportunity to become the defacto personal finance platform and have market dominance similar to FB but they just aren't capitalizing.