Except it's just an excuse to make everyone surrender their phone numbers as one more way to tie people to their real identities. You try hard to paint one of the wealthiest companies in the world as some kind of victim, when in reality it's them that used Gmail as a trojan horse to make people create Google accounts so that they can spy on everyone online, and increasingly in the real world too.

Also contrary to your insinuation that I'm an entitled jerk trying to rip off a trillion dollar company, I de-Googled a long time ago. Because I know they're the company that lets their clueless robots brand desperate parents trying to cure their children as child predators, punishes them by taking away the key to their entire digital lives, and worse, doubles down and continues to defame them when proven wrong [1].

But it's not fair to fault people who still depend on Google. Lack of informed consent, reinforced by dark patterns and justified with "user-friendliness" BS is what drew people in. Peer pressure also forces people to create accounts when they otherwise wouldn't have. I just have zero tolerance for corporate cheerleaders who justify this sort of thing by blaming the victim in the most condescending way possible.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805