The vital services are provided by the government, but require an email address. Some people have trusted Google to be their email provider, and Google is failing some of those people by denying them access unnecessarily.
But we should also expect Google to give a small crap about the troubles it's putting some of its users through, especially when this is so important to some of its most vulnerable users, and adding an option to disable 2FA is such a small feature for a Mega corporation.