The very very important stuff is hidden, and the only two examples anyone ever gives are core search ranking algorithms and the self-driving car.
Even the battle-tested hyper-optimized, debugged-over-15-years implementation of Paxos is accessible. Though I’m sure folks could point out other valuable files/directories.
Former employee here. I remember a third example: the anti-DoS code is hidden. I remember this because I needed to do some very complicated custom anti-DoS configuration and as was my standard practice, I looked into how the configuration was being applied. I was denied access.
Fourth example: portions of the code responsible for extracting signals from employees' computers to detect suspicious activity and intrusion. I suspect it's because if an employee wants to do something nefarious they couldn't just read the code to figure out how to evade detection. I only knew about this example because that hidden code made RPC calls to a service I owned; I changed certain aspect of my service and it broke them. Of course they fixed it on their own; I only got a post-submit breakage notification.
Even the battle-tested hyper-optimized, debugged-over-15-years implementation of Paxos is accessible. Though I’m sure folks could point out other valuable files/directories.