Why "they requires access" isn't fine?
It looks grammatically incorrect but the ambiguity is removed thanks to the "s" particle.
English already has similar irregularities in other contexts which seem to bother nobody.
i.e the sentence "If I were you, I'd do X and Y". The word "were" looks weird there but it solves a problem. Can't we treat "they" as singular in a similar manner?
This can introduce ambiguity, but declining to use ancient (800 years, why are we debating it still?) inclusive phrasing because some people fail to create context for their pronouns is silly.
It just isn't.
When I was learning French I quickly learnt not to question why something is right or wrong. It's wrong because the natives say it's wrong. It's as simple as that.
I just feel (citation needed) that there are more non-native English speakers than native ones and natives' opinions is no longer enough.
"They need access" - no context, ambiguous.
"They need access" while pointing towards an individual, unambiguous; while pointing toward a group of new students on the first day of school, unambiguous.
"They need access" in an email as a single line or a subject with no message body, completely ambiguous and will elicit a response of "Who needs access?" If it's part of a prior conversation chain that the recipient can recall, they'll give access to however many individuals they are aware of be it one or one hundred because it's unambiguous in the context (for them, but not for us).
French and German also use a grammatically/historically plural form for polite "you". But Italian seems to use a feminine third-person pronoun for that purpose ...
I knew it could be applied to a group in certain cases, but only when referring the group as a single unit, really still singular. Or when speaking one-to-many, where each recipient is meant to hear you to refer to themselves, though the speaker spoke to a group.
"you 12 come with me" is really still referring to a single unit to me, the group, not the individuals. IE, it conveys no more meaning than saying "you come with me" where the object might be either a person or a group equally.
It's interesting, I don't think English has a way to distinguish "me singular" vs "me a member of a plural", other than by adding other words like "you all"