I feel like at a place with expensive lab equipment, 20% time can go a lot further. Take smart people and give them a free day once a week to use all that expensive equipment they couldn't do on their own, and maybe magic happens.

I feel like access to Google's infrastructure + data definitely fits the profile here.

I don't really think so. Most programming tasks can be done with a 2010 year-model computer. In machine engineering etc. you need expensive equipment.

At Google it's commonplace for a single engineer to be able to run a MapReduce over the entire internet. Or do experiments with training huge deep learning models.

The fact that approval is not required (aka 20% project) to use staggering levels of compute is the advantage I'm talking about.

That sounds a lot like a hacker space. While with paid time and less beer, it's not that dissimilar. I still think cities should create these spaces, not just support them... and unfortunately even support is almost never given.