Most of the tech companies generate their revenue from their core businesses. For Google it's ~80% from ads, and probably even more of their profit comes from Ads. The history of companies being able to generate abnormal profits in other business lines is not favorable overall. I think experimenting and trying to find new sources of revenue makes sense, but the flip side of that is you have to kill those projects if they aren't going to pan out. It makes sense to shutdown even profitable businesses (or sell them) if you can make more by reinvesting in your core business.
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It's naïve to think that frequent layoffs at the periphery of their business (itself not true - there were layoffs in Ads, Search and other similar "core businesses") won't affect their core business. Google loses a bit of its brand value every time it does a big public layoff. At some point, the Google brand will be most associated with the word layoff and nothing else. It affects morale for existing employees and makes the whole company culture just a little more selfish and paranoid.
Associating your company with unhappiness and strife does not come without a cost.