They need a place to store data, Google Drive is a place for that. Have you used NotebookLM or such which do the same sort of thing?

The gotcha is the permission scope can be pretty broad (read/write or metadata across Drive), so it’s worth checking what you actually granted.

One of them made a ‘twitter but with cats’ page. It made full descriptions and profiles similar to dating profiles but for cats. Complete with pictures and swipe left/right functionality. Stupid but it was fun as we passed the link around and picked out some really funny ones.

I can see a lot of value in making a prototype. Seeing what non programmers can do is pretty cool too. I think the negativity here is over the top.

Just goes to show that google's attempts at chat have been a big flop and even though google chat exists they don't use it.