I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purchases) and I'm pretty sure if the affected customers appeal they'll be reinstated, maybe with a warning. I certainly wouldn't characterize this as intentionally punishing the individuals who purchased phones on Google's part -- notice that only users who directly sent their phones to the reseller's address were taken down. Smells like automation to me.
The "deleting all their data if the appeal doesn't go through" thing is actually because of privacy policy and Google can't keep your data around for longer than 90 days give or take after your account is suspended. Again it seems heavy-handed but is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions with good intentions overall. Know that if you ask Google to remove your account, you'll actually get everything wiped! (That's a good thing imho!)
It really is unfortunate that FPs (or "mostly-FP"s) in Google's systems impact people so badly. FWIW for most Google services if you abuse them you usually get a service level suspension rather than your entire account suspended, probably for this exact reason.