Fought to a draw. Waiting for round 2

Update. I knew better, I really did, but there it was winking at me ...... "customer service."
Naturally, it turned out to be a chatbot. 
Chatbots are designed to infuriate customers, and this one did a good job. You can type anything you want in the little postage stamp sized box, but you get the same canned responses that don't fit the situation. This means you are lead further and further away from your problem, as you try to make your situation fit into the bot suggestions. A few minutes of this leap frogging had Paypal insisting it was ready to deal with my "declined payment" problem. (??)

I dropped that route and went with an actual phone call. This got me a code to input once my call was answered. (They don't tell you WHEN to input the code and doing so at the wrong moment just restarts the automated voice)

I finally reached "Faya", who was either loading her dishwasher or working on her plumbing there in Mumbai.
She "danked" me "smuch for copprate." And then proceeded to deflect my problem as deftly as Luke Skywalker with his light saber, under the watchful eye of Obi wan Kinobe .

Faya, periodically put me on hold to "esklate", and would then return to assure me that my problem "riched top pritory."
She put down her squeegee? Breast pump? long enough to assure me that at some time in the future I would be notified and esklated up the whazoo, or words to that effect. I'm on pins and needles.

We had an account that we created with our email address as the contact info. Not an account we use very often. We moved and we could not keep the address we were using (related to our ISP). Fast forward a year or so and wife tries to access our account, but the password has expired. The only way to reset it? Send an email to an email address that no longer exists. Try to contact them to deal with the fact that our old email address no longer exist and they want to....wait for it....confirm we are who we are by sending an email...to the address that no longer exists.

We went round and round before my wife who, bless her heart has been an angel about this whole thing, goes off the rails and lands in full-on Karen mode. Ultimately we just abandoned the account and set up our credit card to deny charges to that company.

My thought as well, this doesn’t sound like anything Paypal would do.

These days Chatbots are preferable to talking to a "real person." Companies have outsourced and also reduced the number of people available, and the quality of the call is often sub-par.

If anything, work with the Chatbot until you're stymied. Then request "chat with an agent."

When you start dialing phone numbers, you've already lost.

I know this varies from business to business. Some are better at Chatbots than others. I've used the Reverb Chatbot with great success. It usually involves the case (safe shipping claims) ending up with an agent. I've learned how to work the system.

It seems to parse it enough to send it over to an agent. The underlying truth is likely that they are actually using the Chatbot as the first attempt at resolving your issue. But they also *want* to resolve your issue.