It's comical to read when it's someone else's problem.
HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless.
My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it.
And yes, there is for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.
1. A word-for-word copy of generic support steps (e.g. try restarting, try clearing your cache, log out of iCloud and back in again, etc)
2. Have you reset your PRAM?
3. Wow you have? Then you'll need to reset your NVRAM.
“Look we got one guy keeping the system alive, we’re not paying for another one.”... later...
"Can I get that support that I paid double for?"
"Oh no, for that you need enterprise support, that's extra!"
With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.
Note, MVP is a quite valuable achievement, including licenses to pretty much all Microsoft products and access to product teams within Microsoft. Many partners will hire MVPs favorably, as well.
Reminds me a little of the scenario where people bizarrely ask a forum if they can bring their dog to a hotel, some random person says "yes" and then you wonder if the hotel declined to accept the dog if the owner would say "well Bob off the internet said it would be fine"
Well I was going through and approving the reviews (just for stopping spam reviews), and I found a guy leaving a review explaining that he's very sorry but he hasn't had time to use the product as his wife has come down with a bad case of the shingles - I seem to remember he went into quite a lot of detail and obviously hadn't realised this review could have been made public.
So, the reward for helping with the forum are some badges and a chance to be Google's beta tester, and it appears to be working? Maybe they can launch some sort of mechanical turks service in the future where the workers are paid with this "rewards" instead of money.
Explaining it to users is a nice bonus.
Sometimes that means minimalism. Sometimes it means that you have ease of use. Sometimes you realize that your users are actually not your customers, and you need to make the product attractive to the customers, not the users. That way lies madness and enterprise sales.
At a less dire level, it also affects the ability to acquire and retain customers. If a product does not offer the features a person needs or fails to reflect how they use it, the product becomes more trouble than it is worth. Compare Google's and Microsoft's office productivity applications. There are many things that you simply cannot do with Google's product that are addressed by Microsoft's product, or even in the often criticized LibreOffice.
Most Google products exist solely for the benefit of the Google engineers who use them for resume padding & career growth. They lose money for Google the company and they infuriate loyal customers up until they are capriciously surprise decommissioned.