Short answer, no. They do not “collaborate” as in the common sense. They help fund a project, but that never factually implies “I’m making the decisions for you”. You draw your own connections if you want, but Canonical and Google benefit from and rely on KDE and GNOME not dying and being healthy. First of all because Ubuntu and Kubuntu are Canonical’s best players and they rely on these independently motivated developers to keep these desktop projects updated with the times. And Google is notorious for using open source code, and heavily modifying it for their projects to make the production costs cheaper, and this is no exception. ChromeOS might not look like a Linux distribution, but it is. But any sign of Linux has been hidden away to keep the brand “beginner friendly”.