It's a moving target. Forging tickets has gotten easier and easier, and as tickets get more expensive it becomes more and more lucrative. Law enforcement is generally not helpful for this sort of petty larceny so they are looking for structural ways to prevent it.

In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.

They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.

Decades upon decades of holograms and watermarks on tickets to make them unforgeable. But it keeps getting easier to forge them. Meanwhile ticket prices keep increasing (venue space is one of the last things that's truly scarce) and the incentives for forgery keep increasing.

Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?

You can certainly get a smartphone from another company and run AOSP.

But the problem isn't that this guy didn't want to use a smartphone, it's that he literally has never bothered to learn.

Why should society cater to those that literally don't care to learn the essentials?

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If that is your threat model (it isn't for 99.999% of people), you can set up your own email domain for few bucks a year and it takes 20 minutes. Now no one can debank you and take away your ability to go to baseball games simply by killing your email.

But that's not the reason the guy in the video isn't using a smartphone. It's because he literally never bothered to learn or keep up.