This is not for you or Google to decide.
And no, I can sync changes without having to tarball.
I might only touch one of those 5M files a week actually, depending on my structure.
It was not for them to decide up until now.
And yes of course users were willing to wait $duration for it until now.
If you are suggesting a work around that is okay. It is not okay for google to tell their users to tarball "now" "because".
But again, if you ever want to retrieve all 5M files, I hope you're willing to wait a few weeks-to-months, because that's what it's going to take...
Which is why it's a terrible idea not to tarball them first to something more manageable in terms of latency per file operation.