You're missing the point. When a poor tech illiterate person signs up for an email account, they probably don't consider if they will someday need phone support to recover an account. They will choose a free account over an account that costs $5/month that they don't have. And that assumes that they even know about the paid email services. For a lot of tech illiterate people email and gmail are synonymous.

And the "don't have" you state, is key here. There is no way the poor people the librarian is talking about, can afford that 5 bucks.