And people will leave Google for another free email service if even a small percent of people begin to lose their accounts.
Google definitely has an incentive to keep email functional.
Average person: 1k, "what glitch?" 10k, "So what." 100k, "It didn't happen to me." 1m, "I don't use it for anything important anyway."
Google has ~ 1.5 billion users. If something happens to 1 in 1000 people, then a) it won't happen to most people, b) most people won't know anybody it happened to, and c) maybe it happens to a friend of a friend. If they hear about it, they will likely say, "Oh, I'm sure there's a reason."
A reporter might hear stories about people who lose their accounts. They might even find those people. But so what? Right here in this discussion we're hearing those stories. Could this be happening to a million people across the globe per year? Sure. Does anybody know the true number? Nope.
So if you could discover the hard number (which you can't), maybe you could get a tech reporter to write about it. Then Google PR would go into action. They'd say correctly that it's a small fraction of their users, that keeping everyone safe is a difficult problem, and that they work hard to make sure everybody who should have access does, but sometimes people get swept up in Google's crime-fighting. All of which is true! Then they'll turn back on the accounts of the people the reporter actually talked to. PR will say that they've made process changes that have solved the problem, the reporter will include the happy endings, and that will be the end of it.
Just for comparison, tobacco kills about a half-million people a year in the US. It's totally unnecessary, but it's profitable for the tobacco companies. As long as it's killing somebody else, people are basically fine with it. If they can be chill about that, they will certainly be chill about you losing your Google account. They'll think you probably did something.
I wouldn't hold my breath. I encourage people to put their money where their mouth is. E.g., I host my email with Fastmail.com. is that free? No, and thank goodness.
Google's core business is selling your eyeballs to people who want to influence you. Their relationship to eyeball owners is statistical; as long as they are providing adequate quantities of wallet-connected eyeballs to the highest bidder, they do fine. This drives a fundamentally different culture than businesses that live and die by customer relationships. And culture is extremely hard to change.
I don't know Google's numbers offhand, but Twitter's revenue is about $1 per eyeball-pair per month, with per-user profit much lower. Think about your salary, and then think about how much work you'd be willing to do for a given account. By my numbers, handling one medium-sized customer service issue could easily wipe out an entire lifetime of profit.
And that's before we even get into the literal millions of scammers, jerks, loons, and mafiosi that would a) happily misuse a Google account, and b) will eagerly waste hours of customer service time lying up a storm. Every extra inch Google gives an actual well-intentioned user means a few hundred miles taken up by that lot. Which is expensive indeed.
So I am entirely grateful that I'm paying Fastmail $50/account/year. That builds a culture of wanting each customer to succeed. Of wanting customers to say good things to potential customers. Which means if that there's some bump in the relationship, they're going to at least hear me out. If you too want that, please pay people money for services.