I risked reading below the line on the article, and among the frothing rants is one very salient point - not that long ago, old-guard public utility companies (the example in the comment is AT&T prior to the 1980s, but other firms in other countries are also good examples) had everyone as a customer, and nothing seemed to stop them from providing at least a bit of personal support. It may have been second-rate a lot of the time, but one could contact them, and directly - in the case of the telephone network, one could speak to an operator more or less immediately and more or less any time of day.

Obviously it isn't the case that Google's support operation is in the exact same problem-space, but I was interested to realise that the pure statistical "there are too many users" argument doesn't immediately excuse them.