Although I don’t use Chrome and haven’t for more than a decade, this smells like normal security practice than a better-with-Netscape. The account is dormant.

Although I don’t use Chrome and haven’t for more than a decade, this smells like normal security practice than a better-with-Netscape. The account is dormant. The browser is unique. And perhaps 2fa is not used…since it is not mentioned. What I mean is your access context probably correlated with black hat behaviors, and so putting friction into the account login makes sense. Particularly given the low value of the content of the gMail account. Because Google knows the content of gMail accounts. Ultimately you got access by jumping through the hoops to figure it out…basically more effort than a script kiddy is likely to expend. Using Arch might have been good preparation for those frustrations? Good luck.