The writer leaves open the "incompetence" option, if you actually read the article. Discrimination needn't involve intentional malice, either - 50-60 year olds often face hiring discrimination from folks who certainly don't intentionally discount them.
Well, I would suspect that Google makes deliberate choices on how they set up these sorts of things. They've probably built models which demonstrate that only n percent of the global population will be affected by a certain naming policy and the differences in cost associated with modifying their databases or to accommodate such names or dealing with troll accounts versus maintaining the status quo. [Keep in mind I obviously do not work at Google and clearly have no idea what I'm talking about]. I suspect that, in reality, Google feels that keeping their uses safe from all the Grass Mud Horse's and Assmen of the world doesn't affect their profitability significantly. Frankly, I would love to look into the best ways to deal with the non-universality of names for users while still being able to meaningfully harvest and utilize all of their information for those sweet sweet advertising dollars. Perhaps the best way is just give users a generic field for "name" (not first/last name) and make the good, old-fashioned username be the identifier.
I'm not sure incompetence is the same as "doesn't handle every conceivable edge case." As the algorithms take over, "sorry, but you are an edge case we didn't get to" is going to be a common problem.
If it's all going to be handled by algorithms, there shouldn't be an appeals process. It seems like in this case "appeal" meant "automatically reprocess and reject again with a form message" until they got the media involved.
This "if it's profitable it's morally ok" model can have legitimate applications, but this sure isn't one of them.