A long time ago I wrote a variant of this - the signup page would generate a token, place it in a hidden password field, submit a hidden form, and instruct the user to click the "Save password" dialog in their browser. One advantage of this was e.g. Chrome would sync the password immediately across all your devices (in some ways this was a privacy violation, although one that the user had to explicitly opt themselves into). New sessions (e.g., if you reset or lost your browser's stored passwords) still happened via email verification, though.

Today I would just use passkeys.