Did the Cloudera exec who implemented this policy have anything in common with the candidates who the policy DID select...?

Niantic started life as an internal team at Google working on monetising location data. Being a revenue centre was the whole point from day one.

Only the "delivery robots" bit of this is actually news. Niantic being a datamining operation that tricked its users into scanning the real world for it is not. Hell Zuboff devoted a chunk of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" to it and that book came out in 2019.

(There's an old saying that makes the point: the only truly intuitive interface is the nipple. All others are learned.)

Sorry, but that interface is a learned one too. If you've ever sat and helplessly watched a new mother and baby trying to work out how to get some milk INTO baby, you know what I mean.