This is a battle we slowly lost. It started with all of support being the original team, then went to 3-4 fulltime staff plus some contracts, to entirely contractors (as far as I’m aware).
This was a big sticking point for me. I told them I did not believe we should outsource support, but they did not believe we should have support for developer products at all, so I lost to that “compromise.” After that I volunteered myself to do the training of the support teams, which involved traveling to Manila, Japan and Mexico regularly. This did help but like support as whole, it was a losing battle and quality has declined over time.
Your experience is definitely expected and perhaps even by design. Sadly this is true across Google, if you want help you’d best know a Googler.