The simplest explanation for your experience is not Google being incompetent.
I have read AskHN’s written a bit later under similar facts. The consultant is trying to get their own account reinstated because they made a new account on behalf of a client experiencing “arbitrary” mistreatment.
Outside of that, the market for consulting clients is a market for lemons. Good clients already have consultants. Those consultants hang onto good clients like grim death.
I could be misreading what you wrote. You might not have written down something that would change my take.
Maybe this is not a situation where you pay the dumb tax. But everyone pays it sometimes.
As for paranoia: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challen...
Hopefully you are billing time and materials.