It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this.
Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.
I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products.
Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.
Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.
My personal feeling is that Google lost the ball in the g+ era. Up until then, it felt like Google understood their role was to help others create value, that they had to offer APIs and platforms to let other developers onto the platform, let other people expand the value proposition. G+ was an about face, a totalizing product push, and one that offered nothing to the world. Essentially no API offered. Google wanted to make g+, they wanted to run itz and if you wanted to use it, you needed to use their client and your account with them.
Where-as in the past, with efforts like Buzz, they we're trying to expand the protocols & value of the web as a whole. Once they gave up on platform & tried to be a product company, it was much harder to believe in the futures they were trying to sell.
To my recollection, G+ was actually pretty good at launch. It just was killed (or hobbled, for future killing) incredibly early for a network-effects, non-first mover product.
Early Google initiatives also had a high failure rate. (Buzz, for example.)
My guess is that there are still Googlers trying to improve the web. Young people are idealistic, so why wouldn't they? But nowadays it's unlikely to be successful unless it's relatively uncontroversial infrastructure. (Some examples might be things like certificate transparency and QUIC, which became HTTP/3.)
Higher-profile initiatives to really change things often fail because they raise deep suspicion and resistance. They're certain to be misinterpreted in the worst possible way.
Also, significant changes affect vested interests. Some of those vested interests are internal.
I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion.
Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)
The answer is easy - Microsoft. They didn't directly take on MS's business, but in the general understanding of what was the big tech company, the one that gobbled up the best engineers, the one that startups were afraid would decide to compete with them - that was Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it started shifting to Google.
And even though they didn't directly compete with them on being everyone's OS, they indirectly competed with them by turning the browser itself into, effectively, the OS everyone uses. They killed IE with Chrome, they made which OS you use far less relevant, they took over Mobile OS (shared with Apple, of course), and they are now competing on Cloud.
There is no question that what Google was from 2005ish to 2020ish, Microsoft was before that. You can even read pg articles about this exact thing.
During the lifetime of Google: mobile has dethroned PC, video streaming has dethroned TV, SaaS over pay-once software, online advertising over physical, etc. Google has been a force in all of these (and more) - though not alone of course.
