Yeah, but do you want to bet that during the management call and the subsequent engineering call that made this decision, the main topic of discussion was the direct financial benefit from improved tracking?
We'll never know, but if we could find out, say 1 year from now, I'd bet 100:1 that was the main driver.
The 2 things aren't mutually exclusive. Because it reduces complexity you will likely see a financial benefit from the cost of the engineering team alone. Having managed an infrastructure with a ton of subdomains I can say that it's almost certainly in their best interest to standardize the domain across all tools at least for engineering. Your data is just an added bonus :)
I actually find that somewhat reassuring, similarly to a Google employee criticising the security practices of a Google-operated certificate authority in public[1]: it demonstrates that the team responsible for instituting security policies in the interest of users still has some autonomy.
thought they have moved mail.google.com to google.com/mail a while ago. Tracking would still be possible over 2 domain, but then google would have to do a bit of ETL operations. Guess this will save some more engineering.
