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by comex 913 days ago
Because iCloud Keychain sync is how each person can have one key for others to verify, rather than a separate key for every device they are logged into iMessage with.

It’s described in more detail here:

https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-contact-key-verific...

(This is end-to-end encrypted, by the way; Apple can’t get at people’s private keys.)

And this is a new protocol, so no surprise it doesn’t work with older operating systems. (It doesn’t say you have to remove your Apple ID completely, just log out of iMessage.)