Your point on Paypal is valid, and people dealing with Google checking are making a risk calculation like people dealing with Paypal do (but of course, one would hope that over time, the offerings improve; Google entering this market new should be offering something better than Paypal).
Agreed though - if you are not paying and are the product in their system - then you are definitely at risk.
I have purchased a domain and used it to underpin a fastmail account; personally, I don't share in your line of reasoning and don't want to continue to trust Google.
1) The statement that google deleted someones accounts because they used emoji's in a comment or comments is 100% a lie. Let's be crystal clear about this.
2) If you aren't paying you are not the customer - you are the product. Is this not obvious to folks?
If you pee in google's pool they are going to kick you out. You don't make them much money (they make money on volume) and if you annoy lots of their other users and violate their written policies they have an economic incentive to eject you from their ecosystem. Every MINUTE they spend dealing with you is profit lost - so they are probably NOT going spend a lot of time dealing with you.
If you want control - buy your own domain and point it to where you want to. Or pay someone for email. Or do both, I think those are all great ideas.
But the lies about an emoji in a comment being the reason someone's account is banned are very annoying.
Someone was violating youtubes rules about posting repetitive comments. You can't post the same thing over and over on youtube without running into problems.
They ban entire accounts that are not paying. We've had reasonable (not great by any means) service with some of their paying products.
And paypal locked an account of mine for something like 10 years (based on nothing). Wasn't worth the fight, but was randomly contacted to claim my money oddly.