Is it possible that your experience is an outlier, and not generalizable as advice?
Given your vested interest in Ads and Google in specific, I am sure you know this already.
Without that kind of information, reading stories after having a bad experience will turn your brain into a petri dish for confirmation bias.
If there are 100 bad stories out there, that's enough of a failure of a company irrelevant of its size. And I have personally conducted the support experiment multiple time over the years to have the first-hand experience.
Either way, since you clearly have a vested interest in Ad companies from your HN comment history, I shall engage no more.