I’m sorry but without more context I won’t upvote this. We hear your side of the story but we won’t hear Google’s.
You say payments were made and billing cards were valid. Your account wouldn’t be suspended for that. I’m convinced there are important nuances you aren’t mentioning.
I work in south east Asia and having to explain my dev team why master had some connotations in the us about some race things years ago was an ordeal. They couldn't care less.
US problems are just US.
Think about any medium sized dev agency managing 3x environments for 20x customers. That's 50k/year out of the blue.
My problem is that this fee doesn't look very "cloud" friendly. Sure the folks with big clusters won't even notice it, but others will sweat it.
The appeal of cloud is that costs increase as you go, and flat rates are typically there to add predictability (see BigQuery flat rate). This fee does the opposite.
If abuse of zero-node clusters is an issue, wouldn't it be better to introduce a zero-node cluster fee the same way you charge for unused reserved IP addresses?