Ultimately, Google provides a “free” service to you (i.e. they make money from your data instead of you paying them). You are not forced to use their service. Google is under no obligation to provide any services to you, me or anyone else. The fact that you’ve come to rely on one way of interacting with their service and they’ve now changed things is, frankly, not their problem. It is their service, they get to dictate how their users (who are not their customers) get to interact with it. Their motives don’t matter. You follow their rules or you go elsewhere.
But, regardless of their motives, moving to requiring TFA is considered a good thing by pretty much every computer security expert in the field (government, academia, freelancers, etc.). It greatly increases the security of Google’s servers as well as our individual accounts and, despite your fears (which stem largely from ignorance) with no real risk to access.
You don’t have to use it, but every decision comes with a cost. In this case it comes with the cost of requiring you to do some work to access your gmail in this way:
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set up TFA and create an app password
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find or create an email client that lets you manually set up the OAuth2 with Google under your account; unless you are doing something weird you won’t be making enough requests for it to start costing (note this is different from something like Mozilla implementing the OAuth2 for you) OrangeAssist - Google Assistant Integration has an outline
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set up an email account with some other provider and configure Gmail with forwarding rules to forward everything to that new account