Google warns “passwords are not only painful to maintain, but are also more prone to phishing and often leaked through data breaches.” And that’s the real issue. “It’s important to use tools that automatically secure your account and protect you from scams,” Google tells users, and that means upgrading account security now.
Google says “we want to move beyond passwords altogether, while keeping sign-ins as easy as possible.” That includes social sign ins, but mainly it means passkeys. “Passkeys are phishing-resistant and can log you in simply with the method you use to unlock your device (like your fingerprint or face ID) — no password required.”
This is just one of their excuses, to keep their users inside google’s walled-garden
In lack of further context, and thus conjecturing, maybe as a leash/ransom? “If you walk out of our (Google’s) line, we will kill potentially decades of your history”.
I think OP and several others in this thread just don’t understand what passkeys are replacing, which is passwords. Google doesn’t manage any part of that.