This is ridiculous. We have collectively surrendered email and became hostages. I'm as guilty as everyone* and don't really see the solution.
* most. You're the brave ones.
DigitalOcean might not be the target of the resulting spam tsunamis, but they still bear a fair hunk of the "support & consequences" costs.
That said - reading "Even if SMTP were available" and "recommend using SendGrid", it sounds like there is no opt-out from this. Even for customers who would want to self-host a mail server that never sends in bulk. Now that, is reprehensible, and adds yet another brick in the already tall wall that mail duopoly+ (gmail, outlook, and handful others) enjoy.
Email only persists due to nostalgia. We have literally dozens of other methods to sync state between two machines.
Private git repo? Private IRC?
Note how providers are not blocking other options. Email is inherently insecure due to the header structure, and open to the world by default is an invitation to be misused by spam.
Sorry everyone but an "open world" has revealed we're all just biological meat suits everywhere doing human shit, hallucinating there's some culture binding us (which just translates to "practice of a cult").
Breaking Bad ended 10 years ago. Star Wars was decades ago. Email is terrible in many ways. Move along.
What do you propose to these who are currently forced to provide email addresses to lead their daily lives uninterrupted?
And I'm not asking for the example appropriate for the primary school aged child or a senior living in the care home.
Just examples for the normal human adults.
Not exactly clear where to, though. We don't have another messaging system with quite as wide reach (a.k.a. high value, in terms of Metcalfe's law) as email.
Texts(SMS), maybe? But those are not without their own problems - see "green text bubble stigma".