If the number of users affected is as 'vanishingly small' as a Google spokesman indicated then you'd think they'd be able to contact them - at least the paying customers?
They almost certainly did contact those specific customers, but are sending a warning out publicly for folks who would be a problem so they go somewhere else/don’t do it to begin with.
It’s the ‘police press release’ method of community moderation, like announcing a speed trap.
Cloud services like G Drive depend on oversubscription anyway. If every customer hit the limit, it would be a problem for them.
The fact that threads like these even exist indicate that Google did not, in fact, tell their users:
- https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/268606830?pli=1
- https://forum.rclone.org/t/new-limit-unlocked-on-google-driv...
Banning the letter ö from names on hacker news would affect a vanishingly small amount of users. But if threads needed 100 times more processing and were much slower to load when a user with a ö posted, the problem itself is quite large.
Without knowing the full circumstances of why they're doing this, what problems it solves you can't really say if it's a good solution or not. We can however absolutely complain about the "no notice, no advice, no assistance" way it was implemented.