> but would it have killed Google to keep read-only access to it?
I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.
I might be misremembering, but wasn't the decision to completely kill Google+ made soon after a Google+ bug exposing account data was revealed (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/google-bug-expos...)? Given how integrated Google+ was with the rest of Google, keeping it alive, even in read-only mode, could be a security risk even for unrelated Google services.