How much are you paying for this service you need google to fix? I ask because with their paid email products there are a fair number of routes to get help, your admin, then if that doesn't work you can go up the chain... If you are on a free account you may not be (individually) worth a ton to google revenue wise and so support is going to be poor (they have 1.8billion+ ACTIVE gmail users I think - if they increase costs by $5/user, that's a $10B expense. )

Does helping you look like potentially helping a hacker take over an account, recognizing that google deals with totally crazy state level attacks? Google faces some significant liability and risk here.

Would you pay google to make it worth their time to help you (I actually think this should be an option - if a physical in person visit + someones time is what it takes - then google should have some system for $500 + you get to their office somewhere to recover your account)

I've had relatives in this situation. If you do know someone at a large institution with an institutional relationship I think you can sometimes get help - I had a relative go this route, wasn't sure if the IT folks there just figured out how to fix / work within google, or could escalate somewhere to get it addressed.

Because google will worry about reps selling access to account resets - they may REALLY lock this stuff down, so even if a rep wanted to help, they may not be able to (insider attacks a big issue again especially state sponsored attacks).