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I’m not American. I opened a U.S. bank account with a major U.S. bank (I.e., presumed to be operating legally) without a SSN or US address. I have no other US identification or number.

There is no way around know your customer, but that doesn’t mean “requires SSN”. That’s just the easiest path from point A to point B and most businesses don’t care to support anything else.

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I'm also not American and I was able to open a US bank account without a SSN, however they instead put in a dummy SSN of 300-00-0000. I suppose your bank might have also given you a dummy number like that.

I wouldn't say it's the easiest path, but a critical path. A social security number is usually required to provide identity resolution confidence (name, birth date, and address are insufficient). Don't take my word for it, that's straight from the Internal Revenue Service's Privacy Impact Assessment for it's ID.me identity proofing partner [1].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pia/id-me-pia.pdf (Pages 2-3)

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