This was about equivalent to my experiences with the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5, which is why I was also mildly surprised with this post. They even adopted an unofficial one-time accidental damage replacement policy after a while.
A customer service organization that only wastes the time and money of some of its customers, with no escalation path to get a proper resolution, is still horrible. It doesn't matter that it worked for you.
I agree, but I think that it's difficult to accurately evaluate the quality of a customer service department with these anecdotes because every large company will have the occasional misstep. I have personally heard of bad stories from every company mentioned in this thread that supposedly has good customer support. What's less obvious is whether there is a bias between different types of users. I'm just throwing out a theory here, but perhaps Pixel users are more technologically minded than iPhone users (this wouldn't surprise me) and so they are more publicly vocal about their issues because they are more invested.
For instance, Nexus devices were probably more common among Android developers and reporters on blog sites, so Nexus problems were important to them and were popularized by the online media more than an equivalent problem would be in a more mass-market phone that might be popular in a different country.
tl;dr Every company has had missteps, and I don't think anecdotes provide a clear picture by which to rank them.
