I have the opposite issue with namecheap. I have my domains on auto-renew, and every time they're about to be due for their renewal, namecheap sends me a scary email saying I don't have the funds to renew, and only the next day do they auto-renew my domain.
I had that happen with them, when I first finally decided to trust their system to save my credit card information and turned on autorenew. Support told me it was/is because I have a couple of dollar balance with them from years and years ago, back when something involved making a transfer payment to my balance with them and then executing against that balance.
If you have autorenew set, it first tries to draw against any existing positive balance you have directly with Namecheap. If/when that doesn't work, it then next tries your preferred payment method (e.g. your registered and designated preferred credit card).
I was told if I found a way to clear my couple of buck balance with Namecheap, I'd no longer get the warning email. The first attempt would be against my credit card, which would work, and I'd just get one success email (after preceding "upcoming" emails and all that).
I don't know whether this is correct. It's what I was told by support over chat, IIRC.
One of the reasons I use Namecheap is because I've had good experiences in this realm. I get domain renewal and WhoisGuard notices a month before, a week before and on the day of expiry itself. Namecheap then always keeps expired domains in a grace period status for about two weeks where I can still renew after expiration.
About a day before they're completely unavailable for renewal, I'll also get an email from CloudFlare saying the nameservers aren't pointing to CF anymore (I use CF for active and parked domains.)
>Namecheap then always keeps expired domains in a grace period status for about two weeks where I can still renew after expiration.
That is standard behaviour for a domain-registrar, when a domain expires. When a domain expires the previous owner can re-register it during the grace period, after that for an extra fee it can be renewed in the redemption-period.
Finally just before a domain is available for re-registration by an unrelated party it will land in the pending-delete state.
Just add onto this, the grace period is normally 10-20 days some registrar's leave the domain working during this time but some take it down. Then it goes into a "redemption period" for anywhere between 25 - 60 days. In the redemption period the registry tacks on a fee that is somewhere between $60 - $200 so the extra fee gets kicked up the chain.
Yeah, NameCheap is pretty flaky with the warning emails. I once had their WhoisGuard service expire (it was on a different renewal phase from the actual domain, for some reason), and I never received any warnings about the service expiring until they sent an email to notify me that the WHOIS records had been automatically updated.
I've since added a monthly calendar reminder to log in to all registrars and verify all services are still enabled and correctly configured with plenty of time left.
Wasn't Op complaining about Google DNS, not Namecheap? I've never had any notification issues with Namecheap after almost a decade of them managing most of my domains. If anything they over-communicate about expirations and auto-renewals. Auto-renew works well and even after an expiration it's usually easy and fast to get your domain back up.
Your not the only person whose had issues recently with Namecheap not sending renewal emails.