There's still a middle ground available. You can move your emails to a smaller but serious commercial email provider you actually pay for. I moved to Zoho for example (I pay them directly and use own domain), but there's still loads of others available.

I don't get the complaint about the promotion tab though. I had the emails auto-labelled before more or less as private / adverts / notifications / mailing lists. This maps pretty well to Primary / Promotions / Updates / Forums. Anything that ends up in Social I just unsubscribe from. I'm pretty happy with their autoclassifiers. They don't make me not see emails.