I agree with your sentiment, but part of the key difference for me is that SMSBackup+ is open source. I've been building the app myself and using it for years, so I'm very certain what it's doing and not doing.
This may or may not apply to the other apps being affected by this ban.
I suppose that people on the consumer side probably don't have that option, and it's probably not enough to get people to start paying.
I'm very much hoping that we could resolve the issue with SMSBackup+ for the time being, but that's mostly up to the project owner.
I did hear of some folks using their own IMAP server and CALDAV service to target instead of Google, but I have not tested it.
The upside of the design is that it requires only one, very clear, permission: send emails to a given address.
Manually forward 10,000 messages to restore@smsbackup.com?
> I did hear of some folks using their own IMAP server ...
I ended up syncing to a Dovecot IMAP server on my local Linux desktop, which seemed to work just fine. I was apprehensive about the complexity of setting an IMAP server up, but that turned out to be misguided - Dovecot was incredibly simple to get up and running. I assume SMSBackup+ would work just as well as SMS Gate did here.
I eventually ended up moving from the stock messaging app to QKSMS (GPLv3, Github, Google Play, F-Droid) because it has built in backup functionality.