Or wait until you gain critical mass, and then pull the plug on the entire project since it's not making money. It is the Googs after all.

Good take. This made me thing of all the GOogle failures in a different light. It isn't just that they abandon users. They also crush competitors in the initial phase (by being free, or generally having Google branding), only to pull the plug. We often talk about the users left with having to find an alternative, but not the competitors they crushed along the way.

In ads and commerce, Google has much longer time horizon... e.g. froogle was launched in 2002 and they rebranded and "turned on the spigot" in 2012.

Google wouldn't do that because ... well ... because don't be evil

Or discontinue the feature completely when the director in charge of the project gets bored with it

Not sure how that happens unless they decide to launch their own DoorDash clone.