...yet the guy from Google explaining the reasoning claimed higher memory usage as one reason Python was discouraged.

I don't know myself, as I've never written a full non-trivial, scalable business application side-by-side in Java and Python, but I'm definitely hesitant to disregard what a Google engineer says about it, as I'd imagine they have more experience with that sort of thing than most of the rest of us, and I can't believe they'd make technology decisions like that without measurements to back them up.

Is it possible that the benchmarks are not giving realistic estimates about how large apps scale in memory usage?