I am pretty sure most engineers don't have access to do such things. And certain that doing something like that is an effective way to terminate ones career.
I'm also pretty sure no lawyers at Google want anyone to get manually involved with search rankings. If anyone did that it would open a massive can of worms, one the smart lawyers knows should never be opened.
Furthermore, no company would be asinine enough to allow bots, AI, or ML make decisions without a way to undo those changes. This tells me that Google employees are doing these things or your contractors are.
Sadly this is actually the norm across all these big tech platforms these days. Algorithm bans an account, humans might give it a look later if a big enough fuss is kicked up about it, else there is no appeals.
Of course there is a button a human can press to undo these things, but the trouble is getting a human to bother looking at it in the first place.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord all do the same thing.