As a research methodology, this article ... leaves much to be desired:
To get a sense of how common lockouts are and how they happen I looked through lockout reports on Hacker News by searching for [google blocked account] and [google locked out]. I looked at top-level stories and the comments on them for cases where people were entirely locked out of an account...
If the goal is to determine some noted classes of account lock-out, then this method might have some merits. It utterly fails however to satisfy answering the headline question itself, that is "how likely is losing a Google account?"
For that case ... you'd need to have some insights into overall Google account creation and destruction, as well as some way of validating outside of Google's own accounts-adjudication process both how and why accounts were locked.
I've had some very rough connection with this by way of looking into statistics concerning Google+ over the years. Given that for a substantial portion of its life, Google were creating accounts on its little-lamented social service for every Google account (Gmail, YouTube, and most especially Android), there were a lot of accounts. About 2.2 billion when I ran the numbers, hitting a high-water mark of about 3--4 billion accounts.
(Again, not active users, for the most part, but registered users.)
I'd measured members and a few other characteristics both in 2015, when the site was still fairly vibrant, and in 2018/2019 after its shutdown was announced.
Among other observations, I noticed that highly active members were among the most likely to not have a valid account when checked later. In particular, I'd found a list of popular profiles and Communities, and found that a large fraction of these were no longer visible at all on the system. That is, one of the highest signifiers for "account will not exist in future" is "account is presently highly active".
I've speculated as to why this is, though I don't know what the specific mechanisms were. Among the options, comparing highly active accounts with little-used or unused ones:
- Highly-active accounts are more likely to cross some red line or trip some automated, or crowdsourced, flagging mechanism.
- Highly-active members are more likely to become discouraged with the platform itself. (That was certainly my own experience, though I never fully deleted my account.)
As to the question raised by TFA: I've been locked out of several Google accounts, though I've succeeded in recovering the ones I cared about. As a result of those events, however, I've also all but entirely curtailed my use of any authenticated Google services.