The storage now being limited is for Gsuite- Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.
These aren't the products you'd store a lab's datasets in. They simply aren't designed for that and won't provide acceptable APIs, performance, etc. Thus although this change may stink for university IT, I don't see an alternate world where this lab had embraced Gsuite storage and was crippled by it.
You name the technology, I've seen it be used to store results. If a system is centrally funded by the main university (and not the lab itself), researchers will find a way to get it to hold research data if it has an interface to ingest a file...
They don't need acceptable APIs or performance - they need something as opposed to nothing, and they'll find a way to make it work! More to the point, they need basic IT infrastructure funded by something central in the university. If there was a centrally funded way to use s3 with glacier for archival, (so they don't need to spend lab money on it forever more), many would use it.
In my experience, often the issue is a lack of local budget, meaning infinite ingenuity to find a way to use what is available to get the best outcome for their research. Any ability to upload and store a file for later retrieval can, with enough low-cost RA time, be made into a apparently infinite free storage system!
I’m I’ll move a copy somewhere else if I ever need to conduct new research on it, but I’m sure if I had gone on to take a phd each paper, published or not would end up in a folder on gdrive if google had promised me the space.