If a service has thousands of times more users than another, you'll expect weird edge cases to show up thousands of times more often.
People underestimate the power of a calm, deliberate letter sent by post with an elected representative or two copied.
It shows you're serious. Most people complain to blow off steam. This is what customer service handles. If you want something done at the corporate policy level, e.g. to have policy changed or have a decision made per policy reversed, you attack at higher levels.
The traditional form of leverage is legal. Have a lawyer pen a letter gets you out of customer service. It is as effective as it is expensive. Next best is a regulator (you can think of these as narrowly-scoped, publicly-funded lawyers). Unfortunately, nobody regulates Google.
So your final threat is getting a lawmaker pissed off with you. This is less about passing legislation (it's hard to pass legislation; everyone knows that) than creating an official, reliably-corroborated paper trail which could go public, causing PR damage, and/or damage relationships the company may want to lean on in the future.
More practically, I don't want to sit around writing and responding to letters. Having someone else do the back and forth with me Cc'd is more pleasant.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact a lawyer.
There are, but that's not incorporated into a threat model because it's not a security issue (at least not a first-order security problem).
Unauthorised access, content modification or deletion, impersonation, and several other categories of security policy violations are also fairly typical.
Most of the cases of people losing access to their Google account that I've seen are not ones which would could feasibly be induced by a dedicated attacker unless they already had access to your account in the first place.
That may be a part of your personal threat model and also your decision-making, but from Google's perspective, that's not a security issue.
Yes, you could argue that only the loud ones making noise get their accounts back, which my be true, but considering that billions of people use GMail, the fact that so few stories even show up means that it's probably safer than even air travel.
Arent there many (difficult to judge how many) cases of people losing access to their Google account, and therefore about everything they had online (photos, email, videos, etc...). That is also scary enough, especially when it happens randomly with no clear reason why and the support of Google seems to be limited to sending info via forms in the hope of a future human interaction.