Yes, I think that is a likely explanation. Also note that Vincent Dumoulin is an author of both the deconv-checkerboard blog post and the new paper from Google,

Yes, I think that is a likely explanation. Also note that Vincent Dumoulin is an author of both the deconv-checkerboard blog post and the new paper from Google, and that the new Google paper uses the upsample+convolution technique suggested by the deconv-checkerboard blog post.