I think you're both right. Change comes from above and reflects from below. "We hire the best" has become "we hire the best at passing a generic set of tests" because they want hiring to be a thoughtless, automated process.
I have been there and seen the destruction (all meetings were about political correctness, we weren't able to discuss anything that was really important).
The best are / were there before they quit to create companies, like OpenAI because it was easier than changing management.
Also I bet Sam Altman would be able to reverse a binary tree (it's a trivial recursion) even if he was never at Google: it's just part of being a professional programmer.
