It used to be a feature of the entire internet, really. Email based signups weren't common in the infancy.

Yeah, I remember. I was born in the eighties. In my opinion this should still be a feature of the internet, remembering your username and password should be enough for a lot of things. Protection against bots can be achieved in any number of ways and there already exists ways to use temporary emails so I don't really get why most places still require you to use an email.

Edit: I mean, I do get it, I just don't like it.

I feel you. Things were nice and easy back then, before the greater population came and made everything terrible and spammed the daylights out of everything.

spam/bots grew out of control. You need to do something to curtail that, and email verification seems to be the most seemless solution.

That said, I've had a burner email for as long as my personal email for this very reason. I even have 2 burner gmails. It's not exactly a huge invasive measure like a phone number (which I'd never give to a site that isn't trying to take payments. Hell, still haven't given Amazon my phone number).

I agree with you, just was an observation about how things changed.