Right. I think what's lost in translation is because it was free, a lot of early adopters used it in ways that are impractical to transition to paid—extended families, hobby projects, etc, and have been using them for a very long time.
I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool.
But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that.
Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.
They are creating a LOT of issues for people if they don't provide a tool to migrate the account to a non G-suite account. I'll be moving email elsewhere, but losing that account and all the services it's connected to will result in a lot of annoyances for me over the years as I discover to what services I've authenticated in this manner.
Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?
Oh man, I didn't even think about Single Sign On. Changing your email on every service you've ever interacted with is a huge project, but if you used SSO, a lot of those can't be changed to conventional emails, and even if you can pick up your domain and hop to Fastmail or something those are going to break.
I was already livid about this change but this is the piece de resistance. Holy hell. Even after migrating to a regular Google account I've still been using my custom domain as my identity.
I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool.
But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that.
Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.