This seems like a tiny problem. Not being able to view photos without a photo app and not accessing contacts not on your phone isn't "killing Android Phones".
IMO if you can't even access contacts that's a pretty big problem. Besides the point is to show the fragility of the ecosystem. We had an AWS shut down a few weeks ago and it shut down major parts of the internet.
You can still access your contacts, but if you (somehow?) updated the Google backup version, and then Google went down before your phone sync'd, you wouldn't be able to access the updated version. So I guess if you update contacts via changing the server side version instead of on your phone then it might be a problem? That's pretty edge case to me.
