I'd like to make a humble appeal to you, dear Reader, that you consider if you are able to exist without Google services and the tradeoffs they entail.
2FA is a strict improvement and everyone should be using it. I applaud Google for mandating a best practice.
It's far preferable to the alternative of having your account compromised because your password is guessed or stolen.
You consider something superior just because it works for you and therefore everyone should be forced to do as you, but you ignore what doesn't work for others (such as being tied to a phone).
And as others have said, you can use another product.
So while I support asking people to reconsider if they need a Google account, I would never recommend alternatives that lack 2FA and where possible, I refuse to use services that lack 2FA myself. Unfortunately there are still some categories like banking where TOTP, FIDO, etc is practically unheard of.
I'm able to live without electricity but I'm not about to call the power company and have them cut my feed. There are folks who consider it some kind of incarceration to be beholden to the electricity provided by a power company; I respect them but I don't share their philosophy.
Unless the situation is "There is another power company right next door," I'll have to disagree.
If the claim is one can self-generate power, the analogy holds but not in the way, I think, the author means. Self-generation off-grid is a pain... Buy or build and maintain your own generators, your own storage, deal with impedance, deal with the risks of operating on high voltage, equipment breakdowns are yours and yours alone to repair, etc.
Similarly, I can self-host my own email, video, web servers, and possibly even build my own voice-activated assistants tuned perfectly to my specifications, sharing my data with nobody... But that's a lot of work when Google has provided all of that for me.