I lost a few GMail accounts because I changed countries and computers since I created them. I tried logging in, Google said my password was correct, but both the device and the IP were unfamiliar. I don't recall exactly what was wrong with using the recovery address to recover from the problem, but that didn't work, despite my still having access to my recovery email address. I think I might need to be able to tell Google what my recovery email address is, and I may have used one of those randomized + suffixes to my recovery address.

I used to use Google Authenticator with my GMail accounts, but disabled that out of fears it's just one more thing to go wrong, with Google providing little recourse.

My password is a bit over 96 bits of entropy, generated by extracting 256 bits from /dev/urandom as a multi-precision integer, divmod'ing to extract one instance from each of the character classes (digit, lower, uppper, symbol) and then the rest from the combined alphabet (digit + lower + upper + symbol), and finally the leftover entropy used for Fisher-Yates shuffle of the password so the first digit isn't always a digit, etc. Passwords are per-site, stored using a gpg-based password manager I wrote in the early 2000s.

MFA would still help for some types of ongoing active compromise, but not for dumps of password hashes from a DB compromise. It really kills me that recovery from my recovery email address doesn't work, even though I know my password.

Honestly, if you haven't logged in from anywhere in a few months and you have the correct password, they should at least just send some verification link/code to your recovery address without requiring you to tell them your recovery address. Sure, maybe don't say where you're sending the recovery link, but turning the recovery address into another password you need to memorize without ever telling you it's some weird combination of recovery email address and recovery password is just highly annoying.