> Are you sure about that? I couldn't activate 2FA in my Google account for years because they didn't enable the option without giving a phone number first.

Just checked, and yes, no phone or email recovery methods configured.

The trick with a newly created google account (assuming the regular account creation flow) is to give a phone number at signup and then remove it. There are some non-standard account creation workflows that used to work without a phone number at all but I haven’t tired recently and iirc the last time I did it didn’t take long for google to require me to “verify” my humanity with a phone number.