[kelnage]

I believe this is in part a failure of Google and other large email providers to provide clarity in the UI when registering a recovery email address. At least when this feature was first introduced, as I remember it, it was relatively easy to misinterpret the feature as signing you up for additional/alternative email addresses, rather than specifying an email address you already had access to that would be used for recovery if access to the main account was lost.

This may have been rectified since, and I'm still not sure how so many of these people haven't noticed that their "new" email address is not working - but I guess they put it down to spam filtering or similar.