It’s definitely not a perfect system and you’re absolutely right that it significantly favors people with strong support and safety nets, especially those of a financial nature.
That being said it’s a very easy shorthand for a company to take and is reliable enough to keep using it, just like how financial institutions in the US use SSNs as private identifiers because it’s easier and cheaper than running and supporting their own systems/assessments and mostly works well enough
I used reddit on a mobile browser. At some point they completely blocked that and made it app-only on mobile, and I started looking for an exit. When the API bullshit happened shortly after I found one and took it