don't care that it's for inactive accounts, this is a disgusting purge of culture. spam email is one thing but imagine all the literal irreplaceable memories stored. don't give a shit about their storage costs, it's google. sort it the fuck out.
edit lol keep weeping for a trillion dollar company. i don't use this garbage, i have no files i'm losing.
I'm all for bashing them for their shitty practices, but let's be honest here. If you care about your memories, all you have to do is login once and they're safe. If that's unreasonable, I think that's a you problem.
The never just deleted data without a plan for you to download it. Your photos aren't going anywhere. If by some chance Google goes out of business you'll have ample time to download them.
Unless you're saving your own shit on multiple disks and putting copies of shit in multiple places, Google photos is probably the safest spot on the planet for them.
The EU is forcing them to do this as part of the GDPR. Google isn't allowed to store personal data for longer than is required, and an account that's been inactive for 2 years is very likely an account that will never be accessed again. Therefore, Google has no legitimate purpose to store that data, ergo they must delete it.