There's another way to "lose" accounts that's a bit more likely depending on your circumstances. I had set up a google account for my kid, so we could lock down the old tablet we let him poke at. I was happy that I had managed to get him his firstname.lastname gmail address in the process.

However recently the family moved to a new country. This basically isn't something google lets you do with a family group, and until you change your play store country, your play store won't have the local variants of a lot of apps, so you can't install them. You have to delete your family group, change country then recreate it. But you can't delete a family group with a child account. The only thing you can do is delete the child account. The help docs mention being able to restore it, but that didn't work, it just said it couldn't be restored. And since google doesn't allow an email address to ever be recycled once it's deleted, I forever locked my kid out of possibly having his firstname.lastname gmail address. Very frustrating.