The most recent reason public reference I can find to this is from 2016:
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...Here's the money quote:
"The team is also pursuing an experimental effort with Mercurial an open source DVCS similar to Git. The goal is to add scalability features to the Mercurial client so it can efficiently support a codebase the size of Google's. This would provide Google's developers with an alternative of using popular DVCS-style workflows in conjunction with the central repository. This effort is in collaboration with the open source Mercurial community, including contributors from other companies that value the monolithic source model."
Project that forward logically by two years.