If true, it does sound terrible. Though, I would focus not so much on one named person. The culture is allowing it, leaders above and around her, whatever feedback systems Google has, and so on.
OP stopped quoting before getting to this other important bit:
> I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
I don't know this person, but have worked with many like this in my career. When you have a leader like this, it's exhausting. You spend half your time "managing upward". Instead of doing your real job, you have to take on a second job just keeping this person at bay. Carefully crafting status reports so as to not provoke some inane decision, making sure you or your team are invisible rather than visible (which is what you normally want), generally trying to keep the Eye Of Sauron off you, because where his or her gaze lands, fires start. Woe be to the manager who gets dragged into a meeting with someone like this--you're going to exit the meeting with (at best) pointless work and at worst work that takes you more in the wrong direction.
Haven't we all? Unfortunately, in most corporate jobs, your main job is looking good in front of your boss, and making your boss look good in front of his boss, who further perpetuates this theatrical shit-show. Your actual work comes a distant second.
I burned myself once or twice by keeping my head down just focused on doing quality work and helping others, but without taking care that it also had the right upward visibility to my boss and the right people above him, and ended up getting laid off, while people who were experts at pretending to work and glorifying every little achievement kept getting the laurels and promotions.
Such is the case in very large orgs with rotten culture and lack of transparency, and you need to withstand the heat if you're gonna be working in the kitchen.
Absolutely, it's hard to overstate the importance of the theatrics and performance art. In many places, it's far more important that you "socialize" and "self-promote" than that you actually do your work. If I could go back 25 years and deliver one message to my old working self starting fresh out of college, it would be: "Buy lots of bitcoin and sell it in October 2021." But if I had a second message, it would be: "Concentrate on self-promotion and managing upward. You'll never get promoted just doing your job really well."
I don't agree with the author's complaint about the culture changing, it's just that the leadership is weak and directionless, which was also mentioned.