Phone agents don't always have to actually enter the security questions to access your account. sometimes they can simply see the answers on their screen and are able to make a judgement call. Don't trust humans, especially not humans who are incentivized to help you as quickly as possible.
Also its easier to say a word over the phone than it is to say a random string of letters numbers and symbols.
Called them again and another apple employee pointed out that as long as you can login, you can enable 2FA via iCloud (something I'm not using either). Once 2FA is enabled the security questions can be bypassed. Not sure if that required them to change a setting, but from then on you _should_ be able to change anything else, including the security questions or assign another email address or add an extra one or..
After reading this, I tried it and it didn't work. Even jumped on a call with support and they told me there is no way to turn on 2FA without the security questions (at least for my account, maybe other accounts can).
The shitty thing is you also delete your account or create a new one with the same email without knowing the security questions.
Oh well :/
Still, thanks for the hope (short-lived as it was).
The first apple support person I talked to did not know how-to recover the account this way. So it does not seem to be in the scripts.
The appleid is a security nightmare anyway. I used to use an account, associated to an email I own, with a password I know, and still I can not log in, because it keeps asking the insecure "personal questions" that I never answer, because [generic privacy statement] and because I use a cryptagraphically secure password manager. As I did not save the personal questions I answered when signing up (tbh I probably just put garbage, as those are usually never asked when you know the password), and now I just cannot access it.
That's right, I own the email address and I know the password, and yet I cannot access my account. However, knowing who was my best friend when I was a teenager, or what was the name of my first pet are questions, in spite of being known by dozens of friends or acquaintances, that Apple requests as security measures needed to trust me as the owner of the acount. Having them on the phone provides zero help, 1 year later, I still cannot access it. It's definitively lost, and I feel happy I do not have any important information stored on the apple cloud.