I don't know anyone who has a degree in History but that doesn't mean historians are especially unusual. All it means is that my network is quite small.

The same is true here. The fact few people know someone who has been affected by this problem doesn't mean the problem is unusual. It just means there are hundreds of millions of people who use Google and you know a few thousand at most.

So... incredibly rare, really.

The extremely large majority of people go on to work regular jobs that have nothing to do with their degree and lose much of the information they learned, if it was even substantial at all.

Or they rarely make the news because they're so common, and the few that get publicised are because the victim raises a big stink on social media.

I've certainly created Twitter and Microsoft accounts and had them wrongly disabled within days, despite not doing anything at all with them, let alone anything abusive. Perhaps because I decline to use my cell phone number for 2FA?

That's because that's also a common tactic used by spammers -- to register and then do nothing for days/months, on the hopes that an "older" account will be less suspicious.

Nobody's complaining about that though because it's not a problem. No data is lost. Also, I've had it happen to myself (with Twitter) and it was incredibly easy to re-instate.

To clarify, I was referring to legitimate, in-use (with data to lose) accounts being incorrectly disabled.

The ones that make the news are people that are either well known, or have and active way to promote their problems through social media or news site

I.e they are reporters, know a reporter, dev of a popular app, etc etc etc

They are Jane/John Doe that has less than 50 twitter followers and a normal every day uninteresting person, for which there is no recourse at all not even social media

https://transparencyreport.google.com/

If lightning strikes there is not much to be done. Google however can and must have reasonable process to restore the status.

I'd suggest its because its hard to prove or prosecute. Because its technical and obscure. A single case, Google just has to say "Oh sorry; its turned back on". There's no money in them capitulating. And a class-action suit enters into the details of the issue, which are impenetrable to a judge?

That approach: “proof of human work.” Google owns ReCAPTCHA, and every time you do a ReCAPTCHA for Google, you’re doing a little one-time proof-of-humanity for them. But it’s also a proof-of-work; and proofs-of-work that cannot be automated are aggregatable.

In other words, the fact that someone with Google account X solved a ReCAPTCHA, doesn’t just tell you something about who that account is lately. It should add to a sort of “human-proof credit score” for the account, where Google’s systems are more willing to put faith in the user because of all the times they’ve proven themselves human already.

And, for some scenarios, Google does use the aggregate proof ReCAPTCHA represents this way. This is why you’ll never see the Google Search “stop searching so fast” message when accessing Search through Chrome synced to a well-used Google account; why you’ll get a ReCAPTCHA portal from them instead if you’re not logged in (you’re being asked to build the credit score of your IP/session); and why you’ll be denied upfront if you perform botlike behavior through Tor (where there’s nothing that can be correlated to give you a persistent credit score.)

Now, such a “highly-proven” Google account could still be heuristically detected elsewhere in Google’s systems as being responsible for botlike behavior (e.g. spamming); but, when such a highly-proven account is flagged, it should go in for manual review. Because — as you say — this is incredibly rare! So this process doesn’t need to scale through automation, the way regular Google processes do. It can be high-touch.

But right now, it’s not. (Or they’re just not even using the high-proof-of-humanity metadata on the account during this determination.) Either way, that’s kind of silly.