No idea, but one of the most recent (negative) reviews says:
you may wonder how its possible to make something more pay to win, non-functional, scummy and devoid of anything resembling fun than war thunder but gaijin manages to make lightning strike twice. if you are somehow able to take one look at the 2nd-to-none worst ui in gaming with less readability than mobile games, and continue to press the play button. you will be met with the most uninteresting cluster♥♥♥♥ of tanks and planes raping the handful of players and their army of bots.
lets also not forget the initial steam launch of this game, which was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews, was taken down because you couldnt get this free game on steam without also paying for a dlc(which by its nature is non refundable). Now the game has been re-listed under a different name specifically so that negative reviews and associated community news/discussions are lost to time and not carried over onto this page.
But I mean, it’s free to try if you have time to spare…
Yeah, probably, but I’ve noticed lots of sites use security as an excuse to get your phone number. For my work account Google forced me to enable 2FA for security reasons, but wouldn’t allow the authenticator, only my phone number, until they had it. Then I was allowed to switch to the authenticator. That was not a setting my employer could change, either, they tried for half an hour.
Phone numbers are used to congregate the your data that’s collected on different sites to one profile. I’m pretty sure that is the main reason Google and others are pushing you so hard to give it up.
Better late then never, thanks!