And yet, googles previous public comments on the topic are somewhat the reverse - all their interview question except for questions on previous work/experiences were not correlated with "success".

Scare quotes used because knowing how to define success is an even more hairy question that we (industry, humans) dont have a good grasp on either. So any criteria you use might be wrong or a subset of the right (where "wrong" means you would change your conclusion if you saw the bigger picture, which none of us can.)