I'd expect a charge to my credit card, or a bill. If I didn't pay the bill, I'd expect another bill and a late fee. Eventually, I'd expect the debt to be transferred to a collection agency which would harass me about it for years and report my nonpayment to credit bureaus. If it was a large enough debt and I ignored all of that for long enough, I might expect to get sued.
I would not expect to get locked out of my cloud storage, app store, email, etc....
Try not paying the rent on a storage unit. After a month or so, you'll find a new lock on the door. Go long enough without settling up (read the lease), and they will sell off the contents.
Sure, and skipping too many car payments gets your car repossessed, skipping too many mortgage payments leads to foreclosure, etc....
Those are serious consequences, but they're localized to the specific thing or service at issue. You don't lose access to your car because you fail to pay rent on your storage unit. Your house doesn't get foreclosed because your car gets repossessed.
But they can't lock you out of your house, or sell off the contents of your house that were at one point in your storage unit, just because you stopped paying the rent for your storage unit.
Indeed, that and missing a pretty serious sounding email from Apple.
I 100% commiserate with the author and have missed important stuff before, but yeah, this article reminds me of the importance of making a habit to read the emails from my "important" accounts each morning. I setup some guardrails to help save myself from my own humanity, e.g. monthly "pay CC" calendar events.
I was able to talk to an Apple rep and get a kit sent out and get the credit re-added. This was in 2024.
Pretty easy.