Many people exist and use email before becoming homeless. When that email is gmail - they actually do have to use it when they become homeless!

I think if you trolley-problem this you'll still end up with Google's choice being the right one.

I did and I don’t. Absolutely depends on the value and risk weighting you give to homeless people needing their email, of course.

Based on Google documentation you can still turn off 2fa, so we are weighing the account security of the hundreds of millions of users who would never turn on 2fa but really should, versus the people who lose their 2FA verification method and are locked out of their account. Maybe the harm of not being able to login is worse than having your identity stolen but whose to say.

You don't solve a trolley problem. The entire point is that it's unresolvable from most ethical paradigms other than naïve utilitarianism (which is why it exists - to mock that way of thinking).

That's exactly the point here as well - well, without mocking the utilitarianism. It is natural that a corporation optimizes to its customers within the envelope of regulatory constraints.