Hm that's weird, for them to ask KYC so often. At least from my point of view as I don't remember being asked to do that in the last couple of years but I guess it depends on what you are doing with you account and the amounts you are receiving/sending.
On the one hand, I'd prefer to withdraw all funds from any centralized exchange, such as Binance, but on the other hand, keeping my money in decentralized wallets such as Metamask doesn't sound too safe to me. There are a lot of scams and exploits going on, and you can never be too sure. For this reason, centralized exchanges appear way safer, and I believe that if anything ever happened to Binance, for instance, it would compensate its users.
Why would Metamask (which I agree is not safe enough for anything else other than hot wallet) be the only alternative to centralized exchanges when for less than $100 you can buy a hardware wallet and have your money safe?
For this reason, centralized exchanges appear way safer, and I believe that if anything ever happened to Binance, for instance, it would compensate its users.
They may appear to some, but they are not. Its foolish to think that Binance would compensate their users if anything seriously bad happened, especially after everything that has happened in the past with other exchanges and platforms. Btw, you may lose your funds without anything bad happening to Binance as they can block your funds for whatever bs reason they think of and there's not much that you would be able to do without hiring lawyers.
Now that you and another member mentioned it, one of my suspicions is that it has to do with Greek-issued government IDs. We still haven't transited to European ones, which are the size of a credit card and, like driver's licenses, do not have an official expiry date. I only hold stablecoins on Binance for staking. Normally, I wouldn't have them in an exchange, but after the Terra incident, it was the quickest and safest thing I could think of. I'm definitely not storing Bitcoin there, but in an offline wallet. Thus, I don't see a reason for a hardware wallet at the moment.
I'm definitely not certain that Binance would reimburse its users in the case of a hack, but wouldn't that be the end of the exchange in case it happened? That's how I see things. However, there is zero guarantee that your funds are 100% protected.