Email is hardly beter than sms, and we do password resets over email.
Email is certainly far more secure. Consider the steps an attacker would need to do to be able to intercept an email being sent from the service being accessed (say, your bank) to your email server provider.
By contrast email can be made arbitrarily secure nowadays via e.g. DANE/STS-MTA, and it's entirely up to an email provider how secure mailbox access is.
Saying that "email is hardly better than SMS" when the former can be secured via DNSSEC/DANE and where the mailbox can only be accessed by me over an SSH tunnel is truly laughable. In fact since sites which demand phone numbers seem to have some completely baseless idea that the phone number is somehow more "secure" than email, often adding a phone number will enable phone number-based recovery methods which therefore actually reduce account security.
Thats basically fantasy territory for an average user. If you consider the real world" abundant phishing, etc. then you will realise that in practice there is very little daylight between them.