I agree, licensure is appropriate for electric bikes that work like petrol powered bikes. If you use a hand control or foot control to make the bike accelerate it is a vehicle with similar enough properties to a motorbike or motorised scooter that it should require a license plate, registration, and driver’s license.

That said, anything that does assist only is more like a mobility scooter or bike with training wheels. You may not be able to go as long as you can with the electric bike by yourself, but if the drive characteristics are similar then it should be a bike. Those characteristics are speed, stop distance, involvement with the generation of motion, and how the weight is balanced.

So a bike that assists when going up a hill but won’t help you go faster past a certain speed is not fundamentally changing how you behave on the bike, but if you can twist the handle and get acceleration beyond your personal max speed it is clearly different.

If we could have many more people riding electric bikes which behave like supported push bikes then there would be fewer cars on the road, more exercise for people, and no massive increase in risk, actually probably a decrease due to fewer bikes being hit by the reduced number of cars.