Let’s say a company hired safety inspectors, and the inspectors found legitimate safety issues which would be expensive to fix. If the company fired the inspectors would you really be so pithy about for-profit enterprise? Likewise if a software company hired software security specialists who discovered severe bugs in their flagship product. Or if Bell Labs fired a physicist who discovered a flaw in transistor design.
It’s really no different with ethics. Gebru was hired by Google to study issues of ethics in AI. That was her literal job description. She was not hired to put a positive spin on Google’s business. She was hired as an objective researcher.
I seriously doubt you would actually defend the idea that (say) private-sector scientists or mathematicians should be expected to toe the company line even if they have a legitimate scientific objection: this attitude would be a disaster for the company in the long term, even if “ignore all bad news from the nerds” means they might make more profit in the short term.
I think there's still a portion of people who believe (or at least want to believe) Google's old "do no evil" mantra. You're right in the general sense, but for a time it seemed like Google might buck the trend a little.
