You couldn't (and still can't) get customer support from Google and many other customer-hostile companies, so you had to just publicly blast them on Twitter.
Their fear of bad PR outweighed their fear of spending money to support users.
I hate it.
Not to derail you but I have an anecdote. I had an issue with my Google Fi account. Support was a breeze. I completed a web form that said "call me" and within a minute or two I was on the phone with a very helpful human who actually fixed my problem.
My brother is mentally ill, and he hadn't set up 2fa on his Gmail account. It asked him to do that, and then it somehow got flagged as suspicious activity.
I spent the next 6 months in a hellish loop trying to recover it. I was even able to forward them the invite email I sent him from ~2004 when Gmail was invite-only to prove that he was the owner of the account.
It was never reviewed by a human. I would have paid $5,000 to talk to a human for 10 minutes to resolve it. It was a devastating problem because there were so many accounts and documents we were locked out of. It delayed his mental health care for months because of a similarly Kafkaesque issue with his hospital.
I finally got a human to respond by tweeting to Google about it. They informed me that they couldn't help unless I logged in the Twitter with the email address he couldn't access and then tweeted at them.
We'd still be locked out of the account if I didn't have a friend's husband working at Google with access to their internal support.
So your anecdote means basically nothing when Google casually allows people's lives to be destroyed because they were ignorant enough to trust Google's word on anything.
Working exactly as designed, requiring you to be rich and powerful enough to have the influence necessary to get the help you need.
Google employs just the right amount of support to ensure that they do not have to interface with the poor.
I understand this was a business decision, I just think it was always a risky one.