I've never succeeded on getting a refund with Google. There were a few apps that tricked me into buying a subscription (namely Musescore and Yazio), I immediately asked Google for a refund because I didn't actually get what I thought I was getting, and they denied me both times.
Now I just don't buy anything on the Play store that I can't afford to just be outright scammed on.
The Musescore app is just a minefield of subscription farming, it was somehow miserable even with an existing subscription the number of times it tried to get me to also get their weird AI learning platform. Now I've left it entirely.
> I'm sure "purchase does not work at all" is an exception
Nope, a Play store "support specialist" just told me: "I tried to create a refund request but its not allowing to create one since the date of the transaction is out of our refund policy as we can only process refunds for up to 120 days only after the transaction was charged."
Your credit card company will reverse it for you. A non-working product with unanswered emails will allow you to easily get your money back while also giving the middle finger to Google.
I've done it in the past (~2015). Honestly if Google locked me out of all of those other purchases it'd be great grounds to sue them. If everyone started doing this it would prevent them from doing this in the first place and may be additional fodder for (hopefully) continued anti-trust losses in court. If your life is tied to Google in that way then it's a risk no matter what you do and you should probably think about how to reduce that risk. I don't have anything other than purchases tied to my Google accounts anymore.
Now I just don't buy anything on the Play store that I can't afford to just be outright scammed on.