>drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too
You're free to take the bus, or hire a chauffeur. A private pilots license doesn't have any pictures either.
A US pilot certificate itself does not include a photo, but you must have a photo ID to use it. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-61/section-61.3#p...
For better or worse, we didn’t have to make such hard choices for the first 80 years of aviation. And Greyhound etc require photo ID these days as well
That’s not a freedom. That’s a restriction that reduces the amount of choices you have for potentially worse ones.