It’ll be a weekend project to convert over all of my smart home devices and automation away from my primary email account and transition it to a home media account. Then I will turn on google advance protection. Advance protection also puts a delay on logging into the system if you are locked out / some extra restrictions.
Until then I’m just using the key but not advanced protection. If I were starting fresh (a new smart home / google services), I’d make an email just for that and use my original address (a clean name with no numbers from 2004) strictly for mail / financial passwords / high priority accounts. The divide that I would do is smart home / subscription services used by the family gets the lower security one, everything else is high security.
I’d be interested to hear how others deal with this problem.
The easy. Add both a security key and OTP (e.g. Google Authenticator). You have 1 rule to strictly adhere: if you click on a link, you MUST use the security key, because that's the one that protects you against phishing. When you don't have your security key, you can just use OTP provided that you typed the url and not clicked on it from email/text.
The strong. You enable 2+ security keys. You keep one in a safe at home. You always use a security key to sign in. On your Google account you can also enable Advanced Protection, that's essentially this plus some extra restrictions to API access.