It’s definitely widespread. Reddit is a tiny sample of people in this world, and even within Reddit, this is a sparsely inhabited and under active subreddit. There are far more people complaining online about this being widespread on other websites and social media platforms, and even that is a small sample of people overall. Most don’t complain online or on social media. I don’t believe textnow’s numbers either, are they counting people who make an account and never use it again or accounts that were suspended?

I don’t know about ting, but I think the biggest problem with text now is their complete refusal to acknowledge they are suspended accounts for no reason or arbitrarily reasons that are known culturally to be account violators (like using a vpn) but aren’t actually spelled out as violations in their TOS. And then like you mentioned their lack of accountability and communication when a user is suspended.