It's a good initiative and what they're asking for is extremely reasonable - but it does imply Google having more control over the OEMs who are responsible for dumping this stuff onto phones. Microsoft went through this with "signature edition" Windows.
Microsoft wrote their own Solitaire game back in the Windows 3 days. It's not complicated, there's no reason they couldn't have written their own non-tracking properly free game.
They had a little run-in with antitrust regulation some years ago and probably want to avoid it. They kept bundling their own stuff, often with favored access to undocumented APIs, and people stuck to those defaults.
If Candy Crush licensed its source code to Microsoft and Microsoft used that permission to remove all kinds of tracking and internet connectivity features from the game, then I wouldn't mind having it on my fresh Windows installation.
Google actually had a program that addressed this head-on, where it retailed 'Google Play Edition' versions of flagship phones like the Galaxy S7, updated directly from Google, with their own factory image and no bloatware:
