My email provider doesn’t have control of my domain. In my registrars settings I just put my email providers server addresses where they told me to and I’m under the impression that if my email provider ever jerked me around I could just go in there and change those server addresses to someone else’s with no input needed from my email provider.

Did google do something different with these accounts? I didn’t even think they offered a registrar service when they stopped letting you register free custom domain gmails accounts.

Google is a domain registrar since 2005 [0]. But that service was launched for public use in 2015. Before that though, Google used third parties (mainly Enom and GoDaddy) to provide domain registration for the public.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains