I have found the solution for at least those of us who received a 1099-NEC with the Payer's SSN but had no federal income tax withheld. Before I do that, let me say that my problems was similar to everyone else's in that I have been successfully electronically filing a similar form for years with no problem. There is no place report bugs in the Turbotax website so this morning I wasted one hour of my life frustratingly trying to convince Turbotax support that there is an error in their software to no avail. They were very polite but simply said that tons of changes have been made and that I simply had to request an EIN from then issuer. They would not report this as a bug either. This answer is wrong, of course, as the 1099-NEC is also issued to contractors that were paid more than $600. In that case, the issuer most likely does not an EIN to begin with.
However, just now I noticed that the error message actually said something to the effect of "you need an EIN because you had tax withheld". Wait, what? I then noticed that I did enter 0.0 in the federal tax withheld field to match the paper form. The solution? Remove the 0, leave it blank and voila! federal review passed and tax filed. Hope this helps some of you at least.
