When was the channel unblocked? It is disheartening to know that a company was able to silence legitimate criticism on all major platforms and even on places like LBRY.
I haven't used them but I think the most important benefit is collaboration (sending pull requests etc...) is done via email and thus is less centralised platfomr than github/gitlab which uses their own mechanisms.
I recently watched the social dilemma from netflix, they touched the serious matters and presented well but what disappointed me was the lack of awareness about these alternatives. It would have been of great help if they provided references to projects like matrix and fediverse.
The absence of reason makes me wonder a lot of possibilities. Maybe google bans people who use ad-blockers, maybe they didn't explicitly set that way but some of their algorithms must have figured out these users should go. I know, it is extremely unlikely but we're free to come up with reasons if google doesn't give one. Don't sit there thinking it won't happen to you(I was like that up until recently), get a domain name and transfer all important accounts to it. And do a Google takeout.
And it made me download a lot of MIT OCW courses which I watched and might watch from youtube. In case there will be a situation when we cannot download videos anymore from youtube, I'm gonna host a Peertube instance and upload all of these awesome materials. NewPipe which I currently use to view youtube has good support for peertube as well, so I won't miss much except maybe the comments.
I did have my phone number linked to gmail and I was able to reset my password using otp code, not 2FA though. As you say, it might not happen if I enable 2FA but I've had enough that day frantically trying to get my ~10 year old account tied to many things back. But still, I would like to keep my account and will follow your advice but won't be counting on it to last forever anymore.
Last week google did something like that to me. It said "device not recognized" and "suspected activity detected" and won't let me in even after I reset my password. That was my reality check. Fortuanately, I was able to login via my old smartphone. I did a google takeout and downloaded all my data. Then I got a domain name and protonmail account and changed email on all of my accounts to my own domain. Now I have some peace of mind that nothing would be lost even if my gmail account is to be gone tomorrow.
We hear a lot about how the current government is less corrupt and less dynastic. But their actions say otherwise[1][2][3].
[1] https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/bjp-congress-political...
[2] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/electoral-bonds-contro...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_of_Kafeel_Khan