Not only have I not said that Google doesn't offer 2FA - yes they do.
However, Google tries _very hard_ to prevent people from e.g. creating a gmail account without a phone number. Try it if you don't believe me.
However, Google tries _very hard_ to prevent people from e.g. creating a gmail account without a phone number. Try it if you don't believe me.
No doubt they're letting me through because some security heuristic says I'm a real human, and I'm sure they'd eventually make me provide a number if I continued using the account (this happened to me with my university G Suite account a couple years ago and I needed to contact my IT department to manually disable the phone challenge), but so far I can't see any evidence that they're doing anything unreasonable.
Perhaps they're requiring you to use a number because you've tested it a lot.