The C++ from Google that people in the outside world are seeing is not the C++ the article is talking about. Chromium and open sourced libraries from Google are not the same as C++ in Google3. I worked on both back in the day and ... There's slightly different style guides (not hugely different), but most importantly the tooling is not the same.
The kind of mass refactorings / cleanups / static analysis talked about in this article are done on a much more serious and large scale on C++ inside the Google3 monorepo than they are in Chromium. Different build systems, different code review tools, different development culture.
Going from g3 to AOSP has been downright painful. It was like suddenly working in a different company the contrast was so stark.
Interesting. I never worked in Android, but did in Chromium & Chromecast code bases. Biggest difference with Google3 was honestly in the tooling. Style guide was fairly close, maybe a bit more conservative. Also the lack of the core libs that eventually became Abseil.
I work full-time in Rust these days and everytime I go back to working in C++ it's a bit of a cringe. If I look long enough, I almost always find a use-after-free, even from extremely competent developers. Footgun language.