Phone/laptop based biometrics?
Public/private keys with a second factor (like biometrics) as identity I think is a good option. A way to announce who you are, without actually revealing your identity (or your email address).
Tbh that's how all the age verification crap should work too for the countries that want to go down that road instead of having people upload a copy of their actual ID to some random service that is 100% guaranteed going to get breached and leaked.
We need psuedoanonymous verification
If I want to use a passkey on my phone, I have to bio authenticate into it. Similarly, with Windows Hello as a passkey provider, via my camera scanner. It works well and is pretty seamless, all things considered. I prefer it to the email/code/magic link method.
You really do fully own and control your identity, and if you botch it and lose your top level keys, no one else can give you a "forgot password" recovery.
If this level of unforgiveness were dropped onto everyone overnight, it would mean infinite lost life savings and houses and just mass chaos.
Still I think it would be the better world where that was somehow actually adopted. The responsibility problem would be no problem if was simply the understood norm all along that you have this super important thing and here is how you handle it so you don't lose your house and life savings etc.
If you grew up with this fact of life and so did everyone else, it would be no problem at all. If it had been developed and adopted at the dawn of computers so that you learned this right along with learning what a compuer was in the first place, no problem. It's only a problem now that there are already 8 billion people all using computer-backed services without ever having to worry about anything before.
The real reason it's never gonna happen is exactly because it delivers on the most important promise of end user ultimate agency and actual security.
No company can own it, or own end users use of it. It can not be used for vendor lock in or data collection or profiling or government back doors or censorship or discrimination or any of the things that holding someone's password or the entire auth technology can be used for to have control over users.
No (large) company nor any government has any interest in that, and it's way too technical for 99.99% of people to understand the problems with all the other popular auth systems so there will be no overwhelming popular uprising forcing the issue, and so it will never happen.
A method already exists (I think), that solves the hard problems and delivers the thing everyone says they want, and everything else claims to be groping for, but we will never get to use it.
"Something you have" is far more useful, especially if that something is itself cryptographically-based. Yubikeys, RSA fobs (generating one-time codes), and wearable NFC tokens (rings, amulets), and the like, which may be autheticated in part based on biometrics and other attestation, but are themselves revokable, would be a far better standard.
What the General Public can be expected to utilise willingly and effectively seems to be the larger problem, as well as what commercial and governmental standards are established.
(I've had at least one PGP/GPG key for the past quarter century or so myself.)