It's not dead. It's manager dependent, I guess - It's not carte blanche to do whatever you want (was it ever?), so whatever you're doing needs to have, or potentially have, _some_ value to Google, but the bar for that value is pretty low.
It also isn't necessarily just "picking up other team's bugs" (I mean, you can if you want) - just last week my teammate finished up a 20% project to make a new UIView templating/auto-layout system for iOS, for the first example I can think of. This sort of thing is pretty common.
It also isn't necessarily just "picking up other team's bugs" (I mean, you can if you want) - just last week my teammate finished up a 20% project to make a new UIView templating/auto-layout system for iOS, for the first example I can think of. This sort of thing is pretty common.