Sure, people would complain. But they complain now when these issues happen. I'd rather a scenario where people complain but the problems are getting fixed. It's not completely unreasonable that Google offers low/no support for free products. It is unreasonable that they don't have any way to pay for help when there are serious problems.

Make it something you can pay in advance, then.

For a fee, you get marked as a high-risk/high-value account, get the recovery service and risky factors of authentication get extra scrutiny, etc.

You can get extra security from Google for free. https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

Patio11 just had an automated loss of access on his phone when enrolling. Lack of support hurts there too.

https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/114040469625693798...

This was quite unfun. (Fixed now, after I blackboxed what the actual problem was. Some Googlers are looking into the docs/error messages to fix that half.)

Not exactly free, because you must buy a couple of hardware tokens. Fifty dollars when bought from google. But free besides that.

They'd probably get bad headlines regardless of whether or not they required an in-advance subscription:

- Don't allow upgrading after a problem arises to get premium support: "Google won't let me pay to fix my account"

- Allow upgrading after a problem arises to get premium support: "Google extorting me to regain access to my account"