Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, this is a complete farce. You’d think by this point google could offer a simple checkbox in the settings of your gmail account: “Do you want this account to be extra secure and for us to lock someone out of it with any activity deemed suspicious?” And then when you don’t click that box they don’t arbitrarily lock your account. But they don’t. Because they’re a dumpster fire company.
I'm not going to try to convince anyone that has their mind made up about "dumpster fire" companies or whatever. For anyone else reading, I'll just say that we all know there are tradeoffs between security and usability and we can actually have a good-faith discussion about that if we want to.
Thus, as long as the total number of hijacking+lockout decreases, it is a useful policy from the utilitarian perspective. Of course, hijacked people don't cry for help as much, and neither they blame Google as much.
People think a better customer service would somehow solve the lockout problem, but they need to understand that customer service has the same hijacking vs lockout problem, and they can only help if they have better identity verification methods available to them - e.g. if Google asked for government ID for opening a Google account, this would work - but if Google did that, people would scream. Without properly established identity verification methods, the customer service can't improve the precision and the recall. Thus, the current choice for the users is to use a better identity verification method - like security keys and using Advanced Protection, as non-phishable auth does not need complex and elaborate heuristic based protection, and set up a chain of recovery accounts, with all accounts using the security keys and/or Advanced Protection.