I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.
I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.
But think about it from the other perspective. Can they involve a human in every ban? Can they offer human support for appeals? You have nefarious actors with automated systems submitting malware and then automated appeals. How would Google or any other company cope with providing human support in every case?
Either way, organizations that cannot communicate why they took certain actions are not to be trusted.
Similar situation with the creator of uBlock Origin (8+ million installs on Firefox and 39 million on Chrome) Being treated like shit by Mozilla (uBlock Origin is sole reason people still use Firefox)
Curious how much you could share more details about what you discovered during that time?
Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.
But like with email blacklists, false positives do happen, and are probably quite common. Mistakes happen and that's okay because all of this is a hard problem. For email this is usually not too hard to rectify this. For Google Play ... not so much.