aaaaaaaand you had no local backup of data that you clearly valued?
I'm also slowly degooglifying my life (and recommending the same to everyone around me). There is another grouping of two types of people: (1) Ones who don't do business with Google anymore (2) Ones who won't. That one took more incidents than backups.
Failures happen, disks get corrupted, bugs wipe stuff, cloud providers terminate idle accounts, failures happen everywhere in life.
Back up your stuff and have a plan B.
It's 2022. You dont need to "have a sysops background" to know or be able to backup your data.
The cost of backups also depends on your income. Stories like this led to more backups, but so did going from being a student, to first-job-out-of-college, to a senior employee.
There's a spectrum between a hard drive costing a full day's work at minimum wage to a few minutes work for a Googler, Amazonian, or a Metamate making $500k/year.