Make email not required for a Drupal site account

Also here via search, also building a site involving user accounts for people of all ages, including very young, for whom an email address is inappropriate. It'd be great if this wasn't necessarily a required property/base field.

I understand the desire to "solve" this via #2227381: Apply formatters and widgets to User base fields 'name' and 'email' → , however, the required bit is not something that can be controlled via widget nor formatter. That's a property of the field/basefield/property itself. Even if we were using regular field widgets for these things, how would we be able to control if this is required or not?

Can't this proceed as a parallel effort? Don't we need something other than widgets or formatters to both let site builders control if this property is required, and teach the rest of core / contrib that email isn't necessarily always available?