[ghaff]

Yes. Whatever the real specifics of this particular case, some number of users will inevitably lose access to their accounts in a way that they can't recover from. Arguably, with business services, there will always to some way to reliably establish identity with fallback systems. But, at some point with free/ad-supported/etc. consumer services a provider is sometimes, if hopefully rarely, just going to go "Nope. Can't establish your identity or overlook this ToS violation. No recourse." and showing up in Mountain View with physical documentation isn't going to be an option.

It's not an ideal state of affairs. But the alternative would probably need to be more rigorous identity verification and locking down of systems.