There's a huge amount of criticism for Sundar on Hacker News (seemingly from Googlers, ex-Googlers, and non-Googlers), but I give huge credit for Google's "code red" response to ChatGPT. I count at least 19 blog posts and YouTube videos from Google relating to the Gemini update today. While Google hasn't defeated (whatever that would mean) OpenAI yet, the way that every team/product has responded to improve, publicize, and utilize AI in the past year has been very impressive.
Quite literally almost all the criticism of Sundar is that he is ALL narrative and very little delivery. You illustrated that further... lots of narrative around GPT3.5 equivalent launch and maybe 4 in the future.