There have been so many cases of Apple, Google, etc. doing this that it's hard to have any sympathy for them at this point. If it was some grandma who didn't know better that would be another story, but the author was surely aware

  - that Apple *can* always *just* disable their account
  - that Apple regularly *does* do that
  - that Apple does not care about them at all

and they chose to bet their entire digital life on Apple's benevolence anyway. They lost that bet.

We need more stories like this hitting the mainstream news until even a non-technical person's reaction to this is "well, what did you expect?"