Mailing lists and discussion forums are inherently fairly centralized. But it's important that the infrastructure be not controlled by anyone with specific interests. Google is a decent choice for running the mail list, as other more “cypherpunk” solutions like ditching email entirely just aren't viable yet, and self hosting the infrastructure would put it under control of people who might have specific self interested reasons to manipulate it.
bitcoin-dev stuff is almost always obsolete, development moved to bitcoin-core-dev, and bitcoin-dev is populated by big blockers, clueless people and the like.
The Bitcoin core developer community sometimes seems so far removed from the larger Bitcoin community. I don't understand why that is.
They don't seem to care about migrating the repo to a decentralized alternative, they don't want to improve the distribution to decentralized infrastructures like torrent and they don't want to communicate on decentralized platforms.
No one likes using a Google product but there really wasn't any other alternatives. I recommend people actually reading the discussions on various options and trade offs vs just saying "Google bad"
What is the fear? That Google will shut down a public forum that has full history? They'll just move somewhere else. No big deal. The risk is of being mildly inconvenienced.
We're using all kinds of fiat infrastructure. Might as well use one with a lot of redundancy and up-time.
Google is evil but their groups platform is one of the few things they have stuck with and supported well. There are group communities that are 20+ years old.
If you read the highlighted part of the image you will understand why they are using Google as a conduit which means they don't need an account on Google to do so