I Spent Hours on API Setup in a Tutorial. Then Google Cloud NEXT '26 Announced Universal MCP.

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge Honest confession first When I started reading through the Google Cloud NEXT '26 announcements, my first instinct was to skim past the infrastructure stuff and look for something "cool." New models. New demos. Something I could relate to. Then I hit the Universal MCP announcement — and I had to stop and re-read it. Not because it was the flashiest announcement. It wasn't. But because it quietly solved a problem I had been bumping i