And google is nonetheless happy to have countless other coders use their experiment, just not their own.
Leave other LLMs to the side on this issue. There are a variety of different issue that arise when Google employees might use a non-Google LLM, so that prohibition is in a category with different reasons.
It's ElReg who, true to their style, decided to focus the discussion on Google employees using (or not using) Google's LLM. Even they, however, acknowledge that Google "also advised users not to include sensitive information in their conversations with Bard in an updated privacy notice."
As such, Google seems to apply the same standard to other users (including "countless /other/ coders") that it applies to its employees, no?
It doesn't have to be a primary use case for it to be one of the use cases Google is putting forward. In which case Google is still saying they're unwilling to use their own tools in the way put forward for others to do so.
Gooogle telling staff to not use Bard would be like telling them a decade ago “don’t use android”