Protonmail does offer a free tier, which is the problem. I'm sure they would be happy to take a payment instead, as the whole point of phone verification is to impose a cost on account creation. Perhaps they can rework their account registration flow to offer the ability to upgrade to a paid account at the verification step.
Anonymity toward state actors is compromised in either situation, whether phone verification or payment validation.
Doubt I'm the only one who thinks this, but the value proposition of their service is cancelled by their stated terms, which at least they make available. I have similar doubts about the veracity of claims by VPN providers (including mine) in terms of not keeping logs.
tor remains the only usable anonymising method with a decent track record. It's a shame Protonmail discriminates against it.
It totally is.
I was running my own mail server for a while. The thing that finally pushed me into not bothering any more was when I looked at my logs and realised 82% of my non-spam non-marketing email was captured by google (where at least one recipient was either @gmail.com or a gsuite custom domain).
If they don't provide it, someone else will, and I'll pay them instead. This isn't the Hotmail age where everyone expects free email.