I set one up recently and it also asked for a phone number. Maybe there is a way to bypass that step but I couldn’t find it

These are not 20 year old phones. There’s a reason these transitions are made gradually.

Except they weren’t non-compliant before and this is punishing the users, not the manufacturers. I don’t even know what tech my phone uses for emergency services.

So to let people know that they won’t have emergency service during an emergency, they prevent them from having ANY service now (24-hour notice). Even if telecom companies behaved perfectly (which they wouldn’t) the initial idea was already a problem.