I only plan to use it for messaging in a couple of sports teams and event invitations.
I’m willing to take a lot of measures as long as they don’t get the account blocked - no phone app, dedicated virtual machine+VPN to isolate from other internet activity, purchased fake phone number in signup, adding fake interests and life details. However, I won’t provide any real ID/photos, are these needed for signup?
Those sports teams and events are using Facebook because they want your data.
Don’t be absurd. Of course they only use it because of the network effect. If that’s where their fans/customers are, then that’s where they will communicate. You think they wouldn’t communicate on mastodon if they had 3 billion users because they wouldn’t be able to scrape data?