I'm fairly sure that nobody at Google thinks it's the search engine's job to "console [the user] and be an empathetic listener rather than just find what [they are] looking for on the internet." It seems quite clear to me that this is a bug - undesired behavior caused by the LLM not properly understanding the context / use case in which it is being used (and, more broadly, by the use of general-purpose models trained to handle all kinds of different tasks).
[Disclaimer: I do work on AI at Google, but nothing related to Search, so this is my subjective personal opinion, not based on any first-hand knowledge of this specific case.]
[Disclaimer: I do work on AI at Google, but nothing related to Search, so this is my subjective personal opinion, not based on any first-hand knowledge of this specific case.]