To be clear, Google Cloud always had a free $300 trial. The Spanner news is confusing at best, but most likely clickbait. If you really want Spanner in your default $300 free trial, you can just ask ops to enable / increase quota for it. The OP is a promotion advert disguised as a major service change and written as a PM. That goes to the core of the untrustworthy behavior that I've observed from GCloud reps over multiple contracts.
Not sure what you mean here. The Spanner trial is a completely separate thing from the $300 starting credits. So if you use the Spanner free trial, you aren't spending any part of the $300 credits during that trial period. You can also start the free Spanner trial regardless if you've spent the $300 starting credits in the past.
Correct, we (Google) didn't make the post, so unfortunately we don't have access to changing the title. Just have to hope folks read the comments.
No but you wrote the article, and you have a lot of people who could email hn@ycombinator.com to get the advert corrected. Again, this is more about repeatedly poor customer service than accuracy of this specific article.