[jjav]

> It boggles my mind how people can have their entire life tied to this service and not connect a phone number

This is blaming the victim instead of the ham-fisted limitations imposed by google.

There is no justifiable reason for google (or any of the cloud companies) to be imposing their arbitrary account locks on users.

I should be able to configure my gmail account with a setting that says never ever require anything other than my password to access it, because I know my password is strong and well protected. I don't want any of these misbehaving AI detections locking up my account for reasons that I don't want.

If someone else want to configure their account with these trip hazards, more power to them, but it's not ok for these cloud companies to impose it.

Another reason why I mostly self-host everything, but for less technical people who are not able to do so it's a huge problem. Let's not blame the victim.