Every company has learned that any friction to using your site is a bleed of customers. There are a lot of people who will just not use your site if it requires a lengthy validation process. If there was some kind of identity system that sites would integrate with like login.gov, then people would ignore this, but I don’t think the UK has such a thing that every site can use, so a lot of people will not use the site and over time fall to piracy or illegitimate sites.