As an update to this thread as of now 2 weeks later, I never called eBay except for once when I tried and was disconnected after twenty minutes for them being too busy (never speaking to a human then). The account stayed in a status of restricted from selling but not suspended nor closed.
That fits a hypothesis of mine based on an apparent typical pattern in examples found online: Apparently eBay seems to relatively readily suspend or entirely close minor / newbie accounts, but, on more major accounts like former powersellers, eBay appears more likely to instead first only restrict them from selling. Even eBay probably is not foolish enough to most typically wastefully send the call-in-48-hours-or-automatic-account-closure MC999 version on an account which had paid thousands of dollars in seller fees.
After a couple weeks, someone from eBay called me. According to him and in a subsequent seller dashboard display (plus in an official email sent right afterwards), I ended up with a selling limit, after a 4 minute or so conversation. Actually I was rather happy with it (thousands of dollars and hundreds of items a month after a surprisingly pleasant conversation), and I explicitly asked him if the prior complete restriction from selling was removed, with him saying it was. However, a couple days later, when trying to create a listing, it still didn't work, despite plenty of the month's selling limit on both $ and item # remaining in the dashboard display.
I think the problem is probably that paypal wants my SSN, despite already having an EIN, and that is probably what is keeping the eBay account prohibited from new listings even if that employee at eBay didn't notice. They haven't sent any email explicitly mentioning that, but, if I go to try to add funds from a bank, paypal prompts for it or an ITIN for verification versus name, address, and date of birth.
Anyway, I'm not going to enter my SSN for various reasons (including since saving it for my very best account in the future instead if I ever do use it), so I'm mainly only relating the above for the benefit of any readers interested in hearing what happened.
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