Clarified with an edit. What I mean is that they require you to write up all sorts of justifications for permissions and be very specific about use cases in the submission process, but they didn't have a single comment about any of it, despite our application requiring a lot of invasive permissions. They also approved it very rapidly.

It is possible that we just did a really good job on the justifications, but I have never had a store submission come back with no required changes or clarifications outside of Google.

I took his meaning as, the vetting seems strict before you submit, but it actually turns out to be much less strict after you submit.

Google's vetting seems strict from the outside. However, now that GP has gone through the process, GP no longer believes it is strict.