From what I understand, new signups aren’t allowed without a phone number now. As far as what makes them claim that and ask, as with other proprietary services, who knows? It could be a legitimate security reason, or it could be that they just made up some nonsense because they want to collect more data. Exactly like Facebook, yeah. I stopped using Facebook when they insisted I had to send them my driver’s license to sign in.

There’s no way to bypass phone verificiation, but many people use various services to get a temporary fake number and verify with that.