I worked as a SWE at Google for several years on two different teams, I never talked about work with a non engineer, and one person I worked with talked to non engineers. SWE's outnumber SRE's by something like 10 to 1 at Google so my experience should be more common than the people you talked to.
Your described experience is so wildly different and long tail uncommon from the hundreds of other ex-Google SWE colleagues I’ve had over the years that we unfortunately just have to exclude it as extremely unrepresentative.
