Funnily enough, I actually originally compiled that list long before Reader got shut down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666 I just added a few more recent things to it since then. So some of us at least were pointing out what was going on long before Reader.
As far as I remember the translate API was the first of the recent closures that really caused a storm.
You should at least do some basic searches on these before asserting them. After said "storm", the Translate API was not shut down as originally announced. It became a paid API[1]
I'm well aware of what happened. Making it paid was as good as closing it for a lot of the free services that were using it.
The point was that a lot of people were upset about it when the closure was announced, and thus we can see that people have been getting annoyed at Google for closing things down since well before Reader was shut. This is counter to the claim of the Google employee above that everybody loved it when Google canned products before Reader.
As far as I remember the translate API was the first of the recent closures that really caused a storm.