To be fair, quite a few engineers at Google did yearn for MySQL and a single instance at that. Not for any of the traits you list°, but because it would have let them no longer worry about HA, replication, request hedging, key hotspots, etc. It would have also meant not having a product that works when there are more than a handful of users, but that's another story. BT was a lot of work to write for and that's why Spanner evolved the way it did.
°I sense some irony