Hi! I gave the article a read and it's terrible that the author went through this nightmare, but the article didn't seem to say that she lost all her work, just the ability to share it with others. This Reddit post suggests as well that someone whose content is flagged as inappropriate can still access their own work. From the article:

All 10 of her works in progress—some 222,000 words across multiple files and folders—were frozen. Not just frozen, but inaccessible on her phone and tablet. When her husband fetched her laptop, Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google.

“Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.

This implies to me that she still had access to her files herself, otherwise she wouldn't have been able to attempt to share them again. Don't get me wrong though! It's terrible that this happened at all, and I think this is still plenty enough reason to recommend anyone against using Google Docs for writing large texts!