My authenticator proves I am me and I have not had any problems with my local offline solution until google, whereas email and SMS is vulnerable and I do not trust them to secure an account. I can use KPXC to generate codes or even yubikey if I was into that. I lost my gmail account I used only for an online game so while it is not a huge loss, it is annoying since the developer probably cannot help me with losing my game data. Google wants a cell phone number for no reason and has 0 support staff that I can talk to. You can't even make a google account with their new qr bullshit without a cell phone number. So, authenticators are better than email and SMS.