Seriously, we've been in this for a decade at least. There was enough time to learn this single lesson: data stored in someone's cloud is not your data.
In 2022 it's plain stupid to keep your email in Gmail or rely on Google Photos as the only storage for your family archive. People pay $15/mo for Netflix, but can't pay $50/year for a email address? Nobody will lend a random person $1000, but people still happily give their work, worth orders of magnitude more, to a company that has literally zero obligations to them.
I sincerely sympathize with this couple and wish they will eventually recover their stuff, but c'mon, let's be proactive and prevent such incidents (and educate/help others)