Really? I've been dealing with Gandi for something like 20 years and have never before now heard of anything like this, nor experienced it.
Some evidence, please.
Some evidence, please.
But the GP's story is about identity verification; I don't see that as a particularly egregious "shenanigan".
Would maybe be defensible if they asked for actually verifiable information, like a dump of the cryptographically signed contents of your chipped passport (haha).