Where I live it could take months (or even years if thr heirs of a deceased doesn't agree on the terms) to have the access to the money. It would be quite illegal to knowingly use the money of a deceased person, but things happens.

This is a place with significant cultural differences.

I can't imagine my parents wanting me to be locked out, and I can't imagine wanting my children to be locked out. Things like personal correspondence usually stop being private once someone is deceased, and indeed, are one of the few ways to get you know your ancestors.

I'm not American by birth, but I've lived in America long enough to understand both values. I don't think either way is better, but this strong emphasis on privacy (with family) is a very Western phenomenon. In most places, families have far fewer internal secrets.

What's especially odd is how much more Google and other corporations are allowed to know about Americans than families. For me, it's backwards.

One of my parents neighbors died suddenly of Covid. She ran a small business as a vacation planner. Her husband did not have her email password. This was a huge pain and a source of stress when he was arranging the funeral because he was unable to inform people who expected her to be managing their upcoming vacation that she died. Sometimes timely access is valuable.

Having going through this experience, there is often lots of little things. Maybe there was a shared domain registered to your email account. Closing or moving Netflix, or Disney+, or your vegetable subscription service, is much easier if you can just log in and close the account -- this can be done by writing to the companies, or if you just stop paying and responding, but everything is just easier with email access.

Transferring financial accounts I found out to be a very difficult and time consuming process. In some cases it was just flat out not possible even though I had everything I needed. I was shocked by how bad it was.

Other things were also required. E.g. my father had a small business. It was big enough that it had real income and we wanted to keep it going, but not big enough that there was tons of redundancy for this type of event. Without having his passwords the business would have ground to a halt in 2 weeks (payroll). Add to that all sorts of business accounts (domains, mail, accounting, etc, etc) and having this emergency access turned out to be the key to keeping things going.

Even his personal email - he would have wanted us to have access, but how does he give access without just giving us his PW? Turned out that emergency access was the perfect solution.