For people authoring original content who may end up having the only copy of a given piece of news-relevant data in their possession, using a lossy compression method to back it up sort of defeats the purpose. This isn’t stashing your old DVD collection, this is trying to back up privileged professional data.
This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you’re tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I’m fairly sure there’s a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word “unlimited”. If they didn’t want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn’t have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.