Apple messaging intercepting texts that iphone users send me

Thanks for directing me to the support chat -- It took a while, but we came to the tentative conclusion that because I was signed in to iMessage, when an iPhone user has my email address in their contacts and they go to send me an SMS, they see me as "green" on iMessage and would generally choose that as the delivery option (I don't know what this means as I'm not an iPhone user, but I have seen stories about green vs blue bubbles and a weird divisive Us vs Them culture).

The suggestion was that I sign out of iMessage on my Mac, and then iPhone users shouldn't see that as an available option, so they would default to SMSing me and the world will be a happier place. We weren't able to confirm this with a test though -- I was asked to have my mother-in-law try messaging me, but it was the middle of the night where she is, so that wasn't really an option.

For now I'm going to try to stay logged out of iMessage. Hopefully I'll only need to sign in when I want to facetime my mom -- which is really the only time I ever use any apple based communication mechanism. I seem to recall my Mac nagging me to sign in to iMessage in the past though and failing to do things if I wasn't logged in (other than simply connecting to facetime). We'll see how this goes.

I'll also try sending feedback at https://www.apple.com/feedback asking apple to please consider less aggressively pursuing a market expansion strategy that focuses on loyalty incentivizing features at the expense of creating divisive mechanisms that separate apple and non apple users from one another. I feel like the victim here, but my connections aren't the perpetrators -- that would be Apple.

I'm not sure I understand -- I've never associated iMessage with my phone as I've never had an iPhone. I once had an iPhone for work, but it was associated with a different apple id. A few months ago when I upgraded my macos, it forced me to enable two factor authentication which required me to supply a phone number. Is that why this started happening? That would make sense for some people, but not all, because other people's messages went to my computer before I even added my phone number. My account is only associated with my email address -- so I think it's more a problem for people who try to send me an SMS at my phone number, but also happen to have my email address listed under that same contact in their iPhone. How else would apple have known to send those messages to iMessage on my computer instead of my phone?

Also, I tried deregistering my number using the online method you mentioned -- it sent me a 6 digit code and I entered the code and selected submit, but then it told me that my number wasn't registered with iMessage.