I would say that this applies to most of the companies with hundreds of millions of users. The account flagging needs to be automated and there is still some fraction of false positives. The appeal process is not easy because the false positive users are intermixed with bad actors. The human time dealing with the appeals is limited due to the sheer numbers of users.

For me the solution is to use a paid service or a free service at smaller business where employee/user ratio is better.

To be fair, I don't think other providers like Microsoft are much better, but also note that the service is equally bad if you pay for ads or cloud.

I'm generally against too much regulation, but given how important e-mails are (access to all sorts of accounts, important messages from clients, tax, etc.), this is a case where a certain service level needs to be mandatory, e.g., unlocking within few hours.

Every time I needed support for my office365 account I got it and it was resolved quickly and professionally. The account size is very small. Microsoft is in another universe compared to google.

Fair point, I was referring to the unpaid version.

With the office 365 support I did have a minor accounting issue that they didn’t intend to fix and support tried some standard responses (I needed the billing company name to be different from the Domain/account name, which isn’t possible and the support didn’t know and asked me to do a bunch of things before I figured out through a post that it’s not possible - an edge case that isn’t too much of an issue unlike being locked out)

The bigger problem here even if you want to maintain your anti regulation stance is that a Google lockout prevents the user from acquiring the data that is rightfully theirs. If a lockout included something like a 90 or 120 day sunset period where you had read only export, even a harsh termination could at least be defensible.

That you should be able to obtain through GDPR in Europe at least, though it might be an issue to prove ownership if you didn’t provide your real name.

What doesn’t work that easily is resetting passwords without account access, especially since more services are switching to magic links instead of passwords (and the issues of managing multiple accounts in a standard browser password manager with things like slack having different sub domains and accounts for different projects)

Yeah that's just not correct. If you're paying Microsoft for an Office subscription, they will offer you support because that's your gateway into becoming a lucrative business whale of a customer. It's been that way for decades.

I don't have this fear with Microsoft and I've fully locked out a tenant admin before. They have support I can call and get help from.

Last time this happened with google I got lucky and found the password after trying for 3 weeks with support.