As this is about an account issue, rather than in-game content, this thread has been moved to the Community Led Account Help Forum.
Yes. You need to provide an email address to be able to easily secure your account and access account management functions that allow you to change things such as your password, enable or disable your authenticator.
Depending on your email provider, may not need to be a different email to the one registered to the account you already have.
It has been 13 years since players could create an account without registering a contact email.
The two reasons why players didn't validate a contact email on accounts:
1. they couldn't be bothered
2. they thought their accounts would be safer if no email was linked
Sadly, hijackers operate in the 2020's and we need to as well.