The answer, as the author points out, is yes. You can get them out via Google Drive. The author also thinks that Google is doing something bad by compressing a large uncompressed RAW file to 2mb, but that's the tradeoff you get for asking for unlimited storage from the service.

Google clearly states that photos synced to Google Photos with unlimited storage get compressed a lot. On the other hand, if you pay Google for more Google Drive space and use Photos to sync your images there instead, there is no compression.