And those big tech companies are free to lock you out from your account for no reason with no recourse.
I am imagining this working like OTPs that are generated on phones. The actual standard will be open and the implementations do not require a specific platform or any kind of "account", but most people will run it on their phone with Android or IOS because it's handy for them.
I also don't think it's going to require running on a phone, just like OTPs. I can generate OTPs for 2FA purposes on my desktop system running Linux and it works great!
If it does end up working like that, I think it's a great idea.
I too prefer offline-first tools, but the market doesn't, and people are trained to sign up with an email account and password so for the masses "this is just how it is".
I don't want to be a pessimist, but examples of user respecting systems are mainly commonplace in certain corners of the highly technical FLOSS world, it's certainly not the experience of the average person.
TOTP being a notable exception.
Did you see Demolition Man? What do you think about the beginning?
As such I tend to prefer cloneable credentials. Everything that is unique (cellphone, ...) would imply that access credentials could be stolen (as in, actually stolen, not copied), which could imply the threat of violence to succeed.
To clarify, this wasn't meant as an attempt at a "tough guy" acting. If someone tries to coerce my phone out of me irl by threats of violence, they will get the phone. But this being done irl at least has much easier path to being able to trace the criminal, actually prosecute them, and to minimize the damage to my accounts.
Not even mentioning that it is much more risky for them to attempt, given it would have to be done somewhere around a public place with other people and law enforcement around. Meanwhile, some guy from an eastern european country cloning my access credentials to compromise my accounts will almost certainly never be traced, and 100% won't get prosecuted (and that's on top of me not being able to be aware of that happening until after the fact).