In the real world, there's always a recovery procedure. It might involve visiting a court or some local administrative offices, but you can always recover access to anything that's important.
Not so with Google, or other on-line services that came from the tech industry side. Cybersecurity "best practices" is basically giving you a razor blade, and kicking you out if you hurt yourself with it.
Well, worst case is your account with Google, which you can kiss goodbye.
But as we all know, that’s security. If the account recovery is the weakest link, it gets attacked.