In the web browser which is primarily where I look at the Google icons, it's not terrible.
It's now much easier to see my Google-related tabs and there is a decent consistency whereas before calendar, gmail, and drive looked totally different.
> It's now much easier to see my Google-related tabs and there is a decent consistency whereas before calendar, gmail, and drive looked totally different.
Sure, if "Google-related" is the meaningful category you're trying to distinguish from other tabs, rather than a particular task or application.
So, yes, branding-wise these logos all look related (inbred, even), but is that really the single most important quality for them to have? The outcome is that these logos aren't distinctive enough from each other, and have been abstracted to meaninglessness. A better balance between those two concerns could have been struck, primarily by relaxing the apparent constraint that every logo has to include every color.
It's now much easier to see my Google-related tabs and there is a decent consistency whereas before calendar, gmail, and drive looked totally different.