I don't think it's shocking that Google knew about the thread, it's that the AI outright lied saying that the meme didn't exist and then used this post as its source for the lie when the actual post doesn't support what it said in any way. Not that we should be surprised that it's wrong, Google's AI Overviews were shown to lie millions of times an hour, but it's pretty shocking how wrong it was.
I notice... the newer models, they seem like they want to just "give up" much faster, and you have to put a bunch of extra programming around it (harness, for loops and if then's etc to force it to keep trying)
Lied vs got it incorrect? There's always the disclaimer that AI can be wrong...
Fwiw it has changed now and references the meme as well as this thread