Comment by MBCook

This is one of those things that has been an absolutely terrible thing for Apple over the years. People would forget their passwords on their phones or their iCloud account and lose access to everything. And there was nothing Apple could do to help them. So the poor people at the Apple Store just had to tell someone that the last pictures of their dead mom are gone forever.

Apple finally implemented a solution in iOS 15 (15.1?). You can designate people you trust to be able to help recover your account. Like your spouse or a sibling. If they don’t have full access, they can just help recover it.

You are 100% right. A single point of failure without any chance of recovery is a complete disaster for normal users.