Google only gives support for paid things. I was a Nexus user for years and always got good service. I'm in Project Fi now and the service there is excellent. Just try getting support for a Gmail bug, if you're not paying Google money for your phone.
And to be fair ... why would one expect customer service on a free product? Free Gmail is possible because, as a software product, it scales effectively infinitely with no marginal cost beyond increased data center utilization. But customer service requires real humans, with marginal costs too high for a free service. Customer service only scales by adding more reps, which has linearly increasing costs.
I think a reasonable expectation is that if you want customer service, you should actually be a paying customer (one way or the other).
Whenever someone complains about bad customer service, my response from now on is going to be "And how much are you paying for the product?"
