I also had my backup codes fail, which caused me to lose access to the email account I had had since I was a teenage hacker. In the Google Voice was the cell number I'd had all my life. Two decades of emails, documents, conversations, and contacts lost forever through no fault of my own.

>If there are some people from Google reading this, please, don't reach out to me offering to help.

I wouldn't worry yourself on that front, unless you are some kind of celebrity, they don't seem to care that a basic, core function of one of their most popular products can fail in a manner that totally locks people out.

The whole point of the backup codes is to facilitate account recovery, and it's really hilarious to me that a company full of allegedly elite engineers can't do one simple thing.

I point folks to 0365 for the their cloud needs nowadays -- Microsoft does this strange thing where you pay them money for services that works rather well, and office itself is streets ahead of docs. (And if you enter a code... it WORKS.)