I recently lost a Google account I have had for multiple years. I had only accessed it from phones and tablets for around three years. Never had a problem adding a new device to it in the past. But a few weeks ago my then-current phone suddenly died. Bought a new one, tried to connect it to the same account, it demanded authorization using a phone number that I hadn’t used in years (and hadn’t thought to update) or signing in with another device. I tried two older retired phones that were already on the account, but got the same demand.