I don't know about VPNs specifically, but stories of Google handing out automated, unappealable permabans are rampant. There's one on the front page of HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201
Entirely possible that user will get their account back since they won the social media lottery, but for every viral story there are god knows how many people out there who lost all their email/photos/etc. because of some inscrutable machine's mistake.
why wouldn't they? modern browsers constantly snitch on all sorts of things, including IP addresses (I say 'snitch' because so few people outside the industry are aware of even this basic fact/practice), so it's not unlikely they would have some automated banning tool. and the banned google accounts we hear about when some knowledge worker on here goes viral have fallen victim to those tools/systems.
Entirely possible that user will get their account back since they won the social media lottery, but for every viral story there are god knows how many people out there who lost all their email/photos/etc. because of some inscrutable machine's mistake.