Email is too important to rely on a free service which has a history of shutting people out, at any time, for any reason.

Life on a crowded planet depends on third parties; choosing vendors well is a critical life skill.

Fastmail have a long-standing reputation for treating customers right; certainly not a reputation google shares.

Fastmail was blown offline by a couple of DDoS attacks recently. Both of them impacted my ability to access Fastmail, but I suppose you didn't happen to try to access your account during those attacks.

I'm a satisfied Fastmail paying user for years

What's needed is enough of these cases to bring a class action against Google.

It's over a decade since I've used a Google account and I was similarly ignored even back then.

Quite. If you play the game then all is well but if you don't then you are given very short shrift and no recourse to a higher power or anything at all.

There is very little oversight. If you fall afoul of the "algorithm" or whatever bollocks is running the show, then you have to fall back on calling them out on the socials. Get enough traction on that and lo: "soz, lol, we failed here but your <whatevs> is important to us ... in this case ... etc ..."

However, google customer service is definitely erratic since loads of other people have had bad experiences. The best thing to do if you're using Gmail is to enable 2fa and backup the recovery codes offline and somewhere safe. This could probably get you into your account without needing to talk to support.