I empathize a lot with the negative experiences shared in this thread.
I think the problem is that every little decision in Matrix might be reasonable to the people who have complete context about the decision, but all of the churn and rough edges have added up to a very bumpy ride. Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.
I suspect all of these issues and changes feel like no problem to people who are active in Matrix every day and have a support network to chat with where they all get through the issues by sharing tips and info. For the rest of us who are casual users who only occasionally log in it feels like I’m rolling the dice every time I have to use it. Some times it works like it did last time, some times I have to go on a 30 minute adventure with Google and play games across devices to get it back into a working state again.
The guides are written for cryptographic infrastructure nerds and not regular normal users that have a habit of forgetting their own passwords after six months. Not to mention the fact that the Element UI tends to churn a lot.
I didn't even know that they deprecated creating new passphrases, and that's what I was telling my users to do!
Probably just bad UX to let people skip the verification step.
(This general flakiness of features just sometimes not working as they should is probably the main reason I haven't tried to recommend friends to switch to element)
one method of verification suffices (be it recovery key or using a different device)
if you use key backup
I think it's not the requirement itself that's the crucible of discussion but the issues are rather that the blog post should have explicitly defined what verification is in it's second sentence and that matrix/element still is barely useable even for reasonably technical users.
My entire family (including my elderly mother) would be very interested to learn how technical they are!