This is par for the course for Android, having had to work with it at the hardware enablement level. Google will refactor and break everything in a dot release, and then swear up and down that their code is perfect, even as you point them directly to the commit that caused the issue.

This is clearly unacceptable, but I've seen so much worse.

I have some pretty unique insight into this since I work with AOSP a lot and have worked with a few engineers on Android's core system apps:

Google's engineers working on Android at a system level regularly break basic functionality in the "userspace"*. Google's engineers working on Android apps get early access to the Android versions and work through the resulting bugs, bubbling them back up until they get fixed.

(*userspace being used loosely here, it's all userspace vs being in a kernel, but it's interfaces that are implemented at the OS level and consumed at the app level)

Like Google is large enough that I'm sure someone will take offense to implying that such questionable engineering takes place there, but this isn't a story I've heard just once. People working on apps that are part of every GMS enabled Android image have confirmed this completely bizarre setup on multiple separate occasions

? it sounds like you didn't look at the actual commit that changed it. it was an overly elaborate refactoring gone wrong, not someone explicitly and clearly deleting a "case 'w'" or whatever.