Actually it was designed for that, and it was top line OKR for a long time. Amit Signhal rewrote the search engine and was a great leader caring a lot about relevancy until he was kicked out for harassment (it was deserved as far as I know, but at the same time Google lost an amazing engineer).
In my experience the detoriation came after the change in leadership.
It is important to recontextuilize harassers. They are typically parasites on the organization, destroying others by stealing their work and eliminating others from the work force.
Undoubtedly he came off as clever, but being a harasser means that his achievements were outweighed by the benefits.
"he's a harasser => he must be a parasite on the organization"
because then you end up with
"he's provably an excellent worker and hugely productive => he can't be a harasser, you're mistaken/lying"
Some people are really smart and productive and a credit to their profession and also awful to women and/or minorities, and you'd never know if you didn't witness/experience it.
Recontextualizing harassment as stealing someone's work is not just inaccurate, it's degrading to harassment victims and not accepting that somebody can be a bad person in some situations (on offsite when he's drunk) and be an amazing engineer at the same time when he's sober at the workplace.
Harassment is harassment, stealing someone's work is stealing someone's work, let's keep changing the meaning of words to politicians.
I think it's a big mistake to assume that if someone is toxic, they must also be stupid/incompetent/generally useless, all evidence to the contrary. If nothing else, it will make you consistently underestimate some pretty dangerous people. It's important to know your enemy, especially their strengths.
In my experience the detoriation came after the change in leadership.