Well, the good news is that I’m not a total idiot.
The bad news is there does seem to be something weird with backing up to GCS. I took my cue for this from @facboy who said he’d been using GCS with auto class for over a year. Didn’t occur to me that using google infrastructure was cutting edge or risky, lol.
I’ll keep an eye on it, try to get log data, and report back. (While considering switching to Storj.)