Sorry, but that trust has been burned and I don't see a path to recovery. Support hardware tokens or get off my lawn.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally... https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...
They couldn't care less about the habits of a nerd on archlinux with ublock, noscript, firefork a vpn, hardware tokens and 2FA everywhere with recovery code split in 7 different location.
That's clearly malice. Like, there's no good reason that Google would require you to hand over a phone number.
Let me give you a reasonable non-malicious reason:
Googler A: "We have this new attack. People are creating accounts from compromised IPs, and then creating app passwords to send huge amounts of gmail spam through SMTP directly, thus avoiding our browser-based spam mechanisms"
Googler B: "Can we ban them?"
A: "We can't ban them because we have no info on them, just sign-up IP, and the botnet has practically unlimited IPs"
B: "What about forcing them to have a phone number so we can do anti-spam on that, and perma-ban compromised phone numbers from making new accounts?"
A: "Good idea, that'll stop such a huge quantity of phishing emails and spam. That'll be good for the internet as a whole"
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See, a non-malicious explanation.
You do know it isnt mandatory to be a customer.