> So in your example there is no "person" identified by "phone number" but rather "at timestamp X we captured information about a person at the time named Y and using phone number Z". Once you start thinking about your database as structured storage of facts that you can use to infer conclusions, there is much less need for surrogate keys.

This is so needlessly complex that you contradicted yourself immediately. You claim there is no “person” identified but immediately say you have information “about a person”. The fact that you can assert that the information is about a person means that you have identified a person.

Clearly tying data to the person makes things so much easier. I feel like attempting to do what you propose is begging to mess up GDPR erasure.

> “So I got a request from a John Doe to erase all data we recorded for them. They identified themselves by mailing address and current phone number. So we deleted all data we recorded for that phone number.”

> “Did you delete data recorded for their previous phone number?”

> “Uh, what?”

The stubborn refusal to create a persistent identifier makes your job harder, not easier.