The real wisdom to take away from this is that you need to keep copies of everything you've ever entrusted to iCloud because iCloud cannot be trusted. This was one instance where a giftcard seems to have caused someone to lose access to their stuff, but there's nothing stopping some other random thing fully outside of your control from causing Apple to kick you out of the things you've given them to keep for you.

Everything in the cloud is at risk of being taken from you. Companies like Apple are not your friend. They explicitly make no promises and insist that they are not accountable/liable. Stop trusting them.

I agree with this but I am not sure the personal risk of loss is very high with Apple. It is real but is it even on the same order of magnitude of losing your family photos in a house fire 30yrs ago? I used to keep a disk in a safe deposit box with my pics but got lazy. Is that good practice or paranoia?

Seems like good practice to me to keep digital backups in your safe deposit box. Probably a good idea to check/refresh them every couple years too. When it comes to things like house fires and getting screwed by cloud providers everybody thinks that it can never happen to them even when examples of it happening to others exist. The important thing to make sure that you're covered in the event that the rare but catastrophic event does occur. Especially when the cost of doing so is so low. For back ups it amounts to little more than a thumb drive and a visit to your bank every couple years.

Honestly you'll be safer if you don't use any major cloud provider for anything valuable. They've proven over and over again that they are very unreliable.