In this case, GP has it very much right. Brotli was developed by people, not just faceless Googlers. Jyrki, who led the project, is as passionate an engineer as you're likely to meet. In this case, being able to pursue that passion happened to align well with Google's business interests, as it is indeed the case that improvements to compression have obvious benefits at scale when bandwidth and storage cost real money. But someone still has to push the initiative, and it's not as easy as you might think.

Disclosure: have collaborated with Jyrki and the compression team, including WOFF2 font compression, an early application of Brotli.