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It has been a while since I lived in the UK, and paid close attention to IT legilsation. At one stage it was considered illegal under the Data Protection Act (1998) to share credentials to an account, due to the lax control it offers over potential access to personal information.

In this case, I would imagine the Google Developer Account would presumably give them access to some level of information about the customers of their application.

"From there ... really anything goes as to what that developer could have done with those credentials intentionally or otherwise."

They paid them to make the app though, they could put literally anything in there and even with them sending them builds that they uploaded themselves it would have been just as easy to be nefarious so this justification is thin at best.

Are there shared accounts in the google app scene or is giving your credentials to the developer the only way to give them access?

You can share account access with other accounts. There is a Users & Permissions panel in the Google Play Console you can use to invite new members. There's no need to share your password with other people.

> They paid them to make the app though, they could put literally anything in there...

Unless Google found something concrete, this speculation doesn't matter at all, shared account or not. A lot of software/websites/services are developed and managed on behalf of other businesses/people, with those people just trusting the developers/admins with no way to verify anything really.

"Such a ban should be a last resort after many, many transgressions and a result of extensive manual review, not handed out on an automatic basis."

Surely not, but that's what happens if you manage millions of apps and developers with minimum human labour. But even if they would increase human labour ... I guess it is really hard to look into all the cases, because what do you do with (smart) malicious actors, trying to circumvent bans?

Had work with malware author before. Don't think it is possible to manual review those ban due to the massive scale of malware industry.

I have a hard time empathizing with people unwilling to read the ToS.

It contains hard rules regulating what you can do with your app, not just with respect to Google, but also with your consumers.

If you can’t read the ToS you are not qualified to participate in society at the level required to distribute software for people to use. There are other tests, but this is one of them.