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It's a very small concession. The high initial friction still means when someone comes to me with a problem and I tell them the solution is in F-Droid, they have to wait a day. Most give up and pick a different, less trustworthy solution from Google Play.
The victim also can't be on the phone with the scammer using that device during the setup process. We're talking about a very high-friction scenario.
Some is, some is optional, some isn't.
I'm sure there's a hypothetical scenario where someone successfully runs a scam that way, but there's also a hypothetical scenario where a 24 hour wait doesn't succeed at interrupting the scam.
That wipes all the data on the device and requires logging back in to accounts. It seems to me that's high enough friction to resist most coercion.
I don't think Google should be changing Android this way at all, and fear that it will later be used for evil. That said, I thought of an improvement:
Allow a toggle with no waiting period during initial device setup. The user is almost certainly not being guided by a scammer when they're first setting up their device, so this addresses the concern Google claims is driving the verification requirement. I'll be pretty angry if I have to wait a day to install F-Droid and finish setting up a new phone.
Evil, for the record would mean blocking developers of things that do not act against the user's wishes, but might offend governments or interfere with Google's business model, like the article's example of an alternative YouTube client that bypasses Google’s ads. Youtube is within its rights to try to block such clients, but preventing my device from installing them when that's what I want to do is itself a malicious act.