It is extremely harsh for an individual to get a lifetime ban for a single infraction, but you have to look at the costs and benefits on either side:

Google letting a scammer into its walled garden is potentially extremely serious, as they may rip off thousands or millions of Google's users and generate bad PR that scares users and developers off its platform.

Banning one dumb kid essentially costs them nothing, because there are tens of thousands of other developers positively falling over themselves to keep building apps for android. The chances you personally will come up with the Next Big Thing that makes them even a noticeable amount of money on their platform is essentially zero, and even if you did, and proved it on iOS or some other platform, they could always just choose to make an exception and let you back in in that case.

The problem is that you're moving in a world where you're essentially worthless, and that's hard to square with our intuitions that individuals are important, which is why every developer who gets banned from Google (or redditor kicked out of a subreddit, or customer stuck in some tech support call-centre voice mailbox system in India) gets so upset about being treated like a nameless, worthless grain of sand when they feel like an important, significant human being who should be afforded a minimum level of consideration and respect.

Put simply, you're not. Not to these systems and organisations. Unless you're the CEO of Facebook or an app developer with a recognisable brand and millions of users and PR influence.

Outside of those scenarios you aren't a person to Google. You aren't even a thing - you're nothing but stuff flowing through their machine... and nobody gives the slightest shit if a random droplet of water or grain of corn drops out of the chute or gets caught in the wheels, so - though it sucks to be us corn-kernels - if you want to play in Google's system, you need to recognise the fact that that's your station, and act accordingly.

... and that means playing 1000% by the letter of the rules, staying well clear of any edge-cases or ambiguities, keeping your nose clean, never coming to anyone's attention and generally keeping your head down so your entire account isn't summarily executed by some automated script because (from Google's point of view) "who gives a shit, better safe than sorry, lol".

The nice thing is that precisely because you matter so little to them, they probably won't put any real effort into tracking you as long as your completely sever any link between the old account and any new one you create, so try waiting a while, use a different browser (ideally a different machine), re-sign-up with a different card tied to a different account under a different variant of your name (initials/middle names can help), a different mailing address, etc... and unless you do anything stupid to link this new account to the old one or come to their attention again, they'll probably never notice.

You'll 100% always be on borrowed time though, and if at any point in the future you do anything to link the two or even if just their detection heuristics change, at any point you may suddenly be retroactively banned and loose access to your new account, apps, any money they still owe you, etc... both for the original offence and now for ban-evasion.