I researched on the internet and some answers includes enabling the "access for lesser app" and "unlocking gmail captcha" which sadly didn't work for me until I found the 2-step verification.
What I did the following was:
enable the 2-step verification to google !HERE
Create App Password to be use by your system !HERE
I selected Others (custom name) and clicked generate
Went to my env file in laravel and edited this
MAIL_PASSWORD=THE_GENERATED_PASSWORD
Restarted my apache server and boom! It works again. This was my solution. I created this to at least make other people not go wasting their time researching for a possible answer.