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Dangerous? For the users maybe. What are they going to do?

For Google? They get to clean up (only keep "real" users) and reduce datacenter costs.

And maybe slow down account creation used for online harassment?

A phone number is already needed to create a Google account, completely independently of 2FA and a backup phone number

Last week I created a gmail account. No phone number was required. I fully expected it to require one, but it didn’t.

It looks like if you create it through the Gmail app that is a workaround to not needing a phone number