This sounds like hell. Thus far, I've avoided the worst of Gemini being thrust upon me by using Kagi for search. The only reason I've avoided the measures this person had to take is by using Mimestream, which has been my main email client for multiple years now. It's built by a small team, and the founder previously worked at Apple on the Mac-native Mail app, so he brings deep expertise. Being a desktop-first email user, I've tolerated Gmail's mobile app, but now that Mimestream is working through betas for iOS and iPad, even that isn't a problem anymore.

When an entrenched option follows the long degradation in quality from good to fine to serviceable to bad, most people don't have the time or energy to find alternatives, but I'm rooting for more options made by teams committed to quality and craft. In this case, being underpinned by the Gmail API means I'm probably still surrending all that data to Google, so it's not perfect. Since I'm paying for Mimestream, I'll probably give Fastmail a shot in the future, but in the meantime, know there's options beyond a bloated UI that's now shoving LLM features you didn't ask for down your throat.