The original expression came out of an internal company discussion that someone summarized (paraphrased) as "when there's a tough choice to make, one is usually less evil. Make that choice."

In the early days of Google in the public consciousness, this turned into "you can make money without being evil." (From the 2004 S-1.)

Over time, it got shortened to "don't be evil." But this phrase became an obligatory catchphrase for anyone's gripes against Google The Megacorp. Hey, Google, how come there's no dark mode on this page? Whatever happened to "don't be evil"? It didn't serve its purpose anymore, so it was dropped.

Answering your question really depends on your priors. I could see someone honestly believing Google was never in that era, or that it has always been from the start. I strongly believe that the original (and today admittedly stale) sentiment has never changed.

They had to at least nominally have it, early on, to be able to hire the best Internet-savvy people.

Tech industry culture today is pretty much finance bro culture, plus a couple decades of domain-specific conditioning for abuse.

But at the time Google started, even the newly-arrived gold rush people didn't think like that.

And the more experienced people often had been brought up in altruistic Internet culture: they wanted to bring the goodness to everyone, and were aware of some abuse threats by extrapolating from non-Internet society.

If you need to sloganize a reminder to yourself to not be evil, that's not a promising sign

'99 to 2004. You had to have been there, maaaan...