It doesn’t seem to me that Flutter was singled-out. Google is going through a phase of company-wide cuts (for example, a lot of people in their Python team have just been made redundant, as well). It also looks like there is a substantial amount of development (still) taking place in and around Flutter… think Impeller and WASM-support (to name but a few). On the whole, Flutter’s ecosystem seems to be, at least, reasonably healthy. All of this does not mean that Google won’t kill Flutter at some point. I just don’t think it will be now.
Even if google kills flutter, I think the project has reached the point where it can live on without them. The framework and ecosystem has been around for years by now and in the time its been around, its been maintained by some seriously smart people. It can live on with a smaller team, new features will just take a little longer.
Obviously its still sad when people get layed off though.
Google GWT and ecosystem is dead even though it was greatly popular - today nobody consider it to make a new app with that. Same with Facebook Parse - once Meta stopped supporting it most people don't use it even though it was open sourced and seems community still work on it - instead people use Firebase or Supabase.
Flutter is more complex and more ambitious than GWT or Parse - it has currently 12k+ open issues, imagine how many developers you need to resolve all of those. Without Google support Flutter would be practically dead - no company would consider it for any serious new project and instead would go with React Native, PWA, unity, jetbrain compose multiplatform
I tried GWT years ago and it seemed clunky. It reminded me of Swing and SavaJe. Learning Flutter now, which seems vastly better. as you point out "more complex and more ambitious" but also seems much more ready for creating end-user-facing software.
