I would say there's a huge difference between taking a paycheck from Google because you need it to feed your family, and specifically carving out a role in promoting Google's agenda for two decades. Even in this puff piece about him, he is quoted promoting the agentic era of the Internet. (In other news, I recently read about a city that tried to hide that a third of it's water supply was getting used by a Google datacenter. And what happened to all those carbon neutral pledges...)

There's a big difference between working on a tobacco farm and being the spokesperson for Big Tobacco. He is the latter. I suspect history will someday remember him more for this than his work on TCP/IP.