This is my default stance too, and the advice I give to everyone that asks. If you're no big fish enough or you don't have contacts, you can have a serious problem.

I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again.

This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human.

In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services.

So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.