alt Hacker News>> This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cem2jo/apple_u...
but evaluate your risk as you want.
The thing is, you don't need to avoid buying Apple completely, you just need to avoid giving Apple all of your life: your photos, documents, emails, backups, passwords, bills, ... basically you should avoid doing what the person in the OP did.
What I do is have my primary machine keep all of that stuff downloaded. I only use iCloud to sync. Anything happens, I can take the computer offline and even restore from a local backup if there’s a problem.
And this isn’t hypothetical, I’ve use backups regularly for reloading secondary machines for over a decade.