I'm very frustrated about this because for a lot of my family members, their phone is the only computing device they have.
When they lose it, they lose access to email, and there is no backup plan here. Using bitwarden is far far superior to them using the same password everywhere, but this will drive them back to the same behavior.
>I'm very frustrated about this because for a lot of my family members, their phone is the only computing device they have.
That's actually a really good point. My 1Password setup is resilient to device loss because I have multiple registered devices, any of which can spin up a new device with just my master password.
But if you're in a situation where you only ever have one device and lose it, then you can't bootstrap a new registration going from 0 devices to 1.
There's definitely a security/resiliency tension here. Is it desirable to have your password manager protected by just a user-specified password? That can allow you to go from 0 devices to 1, but it also greatly lowers defenses against account compromise. You can have a paper recovery kit, but people will misplace that, if they even create it in the first place. Social attestation could be a decent if imperfect mitigation: if everyone is on the same family group, then maybe the admin or the group can recover access for any one person.
When they lose it, they lose access to email, and there is no backup plan here. Using bitwarden is far far superior to them using the same password everywhere, but this will drive them back to the same behavior.