I don't disagree with your diagnosis of the prevalence of armchair CEOing around here, but Yelp is indeed concerned about Google.

Yelp and a couple other companies forced in Google to a Congressional hearing where senators attacked Google over having too much power over other sites. Yelp gets a SIGNIFICANT amount of its traffic from google searches. So if Google arbitrarily decided to promote its own restaurant reviews from Zagat after a user search, this would crush Yelp's traffic.

That's how online social communities like this work. I like to call it "the democratization of punditry."

You're right, they must have done the right thing since they knew more at the time.