All the more reason to not use these companies for anything that’s even moderately important.

Exactly. If you are at the point where your only recourse is chargeback, then you are at a bridge-burning moment. The company has treated you so badly that you’re willing to light the relationship on fire. Why on earth would you want to continue being a customer of that company? I’ve done a few chargebacks in my life and they were all against scum-of-the-earth companies I would never do business with again.

One thing I've always wondered: since credit cards generally have relatively pro-consumer policies, why didn't they just take the next logical step and write "retaliation for chargebacks isn't allowed" into their merchant agreements?

Because the companies might just stop accepting them or actually start fighting. Also the current state is good for both merchants and credit cards. Issues are quietly solved and problems go away, permanently.

That's one of the reasons I degoogled my life. I want to be able to tell Google to go screw itself in such events

Backup everything elsewhere regularly https://zapier.com/apps/dropbox/integrations/google-drive

You’d want to use frequent Google Takeout for backups of all of your data.

This is why I do not use gmail or any other online services from any vendor which might restrict me from doing things I do. My online dependency is limited to Netflix and Amazon. Amazon is easily replaceable. As for Netflix - there are other services and as an alternatives I'll just read more books. I might miss Google Gearch and Youtube but from my experiments those can be used in anonymous mode. For people who earn money on Youtube it is of course very different.

A couple of years ago I migrated away from Gmail for just this reason. Before I did that, my life could have become very difficult if Google decided to deem me as a persona non grata, and I'd have little to no recourse.

That’s a good point. I hadn’t really considered that.