Some people can't wait to victim blame every time these posts of obvious business stupidity come up.
Domains go into a redemption period because they expire. Having a card or paypal on file is meaningless if you don't have auto-renew.
People lie. People lie all the time, and always spin the story to somehow make them the blameless victim.
There's just too much superfluous information in the post that's not relevant to the problem. I don't care that OP uses Couldflare as DNS. I don't care what OP's email provider of choice is. I don't care he forgot about his GoDaddy account.
Also I think it's the government he should be complaining too, because it looked like GoDaddy reactivated his account for free.
Not saying GoDaddy is a good business, just stating that OP probably might not be as innocent as it seems.
This is purely an opinion.