It's not at the first sign of trouble, though. It's after ~15 email notifications over the course of over a month, and no contact back.

Both anecdotes mentioned timeframes of about 15 days after longer than a year of service.

The timeframe is 3 weeks until suspension, then another 2 weeks until deletion. At the time this user was affected, it was 3 weeks until suspension, then 3 days until deletion, but that period was raised to 2 weeks due to feedback that 3 days wasn't enough.

I'm not saying that excuses things, but it's far from "at the first sign of trouble".