When we were having a short in-person google cloud training session, we used Qwicklabs. From my understanding, we were trained by a Google contractor. I don't remember if the trainer described themselves as being from Qwiklab or Google.

In the same session, we were also introduced to AWS, and for that training we were trained by someone on the GovCloud team. The target for the training was in the field of proteomics and bioinformatics with machine learning. As a University there were on campus clusters we could use, but this was for using with smaller projects. Most people I knew ended up preferring AWS and sagemaker.

It was an open secret, and discussed off the record, that AWS will always give you better customer service than GCP, regardless of being a University scale client.

I don't think the team is going rogue, it's just another weird way in which Google refuses to provide direct customer support.