I would like to make my unique id smaller or at least more pleasant for the user to read. I know that there is the possibility of using slug but the place where I send the email for the user to access their request needs to have a datasource defined on the page. Is there any way around this?
This is precisely what slug is for. If you have a data source defined on a page, it will use the slug instead of unique ID automatically as long as the slug is set for the thing being sent to the page.