The idea didn’t have an evil origin.

There are scammers that are sending phishing links inside a Google docs drive as in this way it’s less likely to get blocked by spam filters. Like “your statement is ready and you’re eligible for a refund, click here to check”

By mass replacing all the links with a Google redirect, (it shows the original one but when you click it changes), Google now can block those scam domains

The side effect is that now the system can be used to collect all the visit stats. But maybe they’re not tracking visits as they can already get full browser histories from Google chrome users with account sync, and that’s enough data