I don't trust Google to fill this role of being arbiter of access to things.

After it took me a week to recover access to a GSuite account that I knew the password for (long, unique, stored in a password manager), that I could confirm access via the recovery email, and that had my phone number attached - but Google were insisting that I was a hacker, and Support-robots refused to help me or assign a human until I found the secret Konami Code that summoned a human.

That experience was exceedingly frustrating, and has killed the last ounce of trust I have for them to do anything for which I might rely on.

While they have neat technology, if you fall into one of the cracks, it's near impossible to get support.

I had to invest 50 € to buy back my old phone number for a week to get to my old Google account. I had password, backup email address, could answer the questions. But the google bots insisted on sending me a SMS to a number that didn't existed. There are many points where I lost trust in google, and this was one of them.

I really dislike 2FA when it is linked to a phone number. There were so many situations where 2FA made huge troubles to me, e.g. I traveled to Asia before Covid, lost my phone. No problem, it is just hardware, I got a cheap 100 Euro Xiaomi phone around the corner and a local SIM card. But I could not login to my Gmail account to get the booking confirmations + addresses of hotels + flight ticket confirmations. It was pain, pure pain.

Apple forces me to instal 2FA, but I just don't want. I cannot use a third party app or tool but must use my phone number. This is pure pain to me, because I want to use things like Apple Cash or AirPlay from the phone to the AppleTV.

Is there a better solution? I dont know. But 2FA, especially when linked to a phone number, is terrible - at least from my usability point of view.

pass: https://www.passwordstore.org/

otp extension: https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp