It's my understanding that Google has ramped up enterprise cloud support by outsourcing it. We ran into evidence of this recently. It's not helpful when the heavily accented, scripted Indian support guy at the other end is less technically informed than yourself, and there's no magic phrase to get bumped up to the next support level.

We're on Google Cloud Platform because of Kubernetes, and I'm dreading the day where we will need urgent support for something. My only consolation is that the Kubernetes community is very active, with lots of googlers on Github, Slack, Google Groups, and so on. We're trying to avoid using services outside of GKE in order to keep our vendor lock-in minimal (Kubernetes potentially allows us to switch vendors), and to stay within the realm of Kubernetes.

You have to face it -- Google's reputation has been severely damaged over the years, not just things like Reader, but also AppEngine, Google Apps support, arbitrary account shutdowns, and so on. Even innocuous, well-intentioned deprecations are hurting your rep these days, and you should consider avoiding this just to let your karma recharge; people will eventually forget and forgive, but if a new breaking change happens every month, they won't. (Contrast the situation to AWS, which has hardly deprecated anything since they started up, and manages to keep unpopular products running years after they became effectively obsolete.)