That seems strange to me, as email is my main form of communication.
What are the people you know using instead?
Now email in professional life is a different story, and is 100% mandatory, but that's all in the enterprisy outlook world...
One amazing advantage to using fastmail (or really any real e-mail provider) is that it is trivial to set it up to use your own domain for e-mail, and to do catchall addresses for your domain. I use this feature heavily, using the general strategy of giving every service a different e-mail address. In this way I can sort by incoming to field, and block out anyone who sends spam using rules acting on the to field. This does an amazing job of sorting out things like mailing lists that keep re-adding you or that are worth monitoring but aren't worthy of showing up in my inbox.
I switched to FastMail, and and added an MX record for the domain I already had to alias the mail adres to that domain. So now I could easily switch to some other e-mail provider at any time in the future. But I’ve been totally happy with FastMail so far.
I did consider self-hosting but decided it’s just too much of a hassle to get decent spam filtering and security set up.
Setting it up in Fastmail is super easy if your halfway computer literate. It literally says what DNS records you need to creat.
Importing your Gmail emails is even easier: log into Gmail from within the Fastmail options. Grant access. Now it’ll import all your mail in the background.
I held off for two years moving away from GMail for this reason. A year ago I decided to pull the plug anyway, and it turned out to be much less annoying than expected. My strategy was as follows: first enable a forward from GMail to your new mail address, then directly migrate the ~10 vital/daily accounts, then just leave the rest pointing to the GMail account. After that, change each remaining account immediately (no exceptions) the moment I either log in to it, or receive an e-mail from it that refers to the GMail address.
It took me about two months migrating away from GMail, and as a bonus I was able to identify quite a few old login I didn't really have a use for anymore, so I closed them.
For regular mail I put an auto-reply in GMail that says I don't use it anymore and the address will be closed at some point in the future. But honestly, I don't think anyone ever saw it as nobody sends regular email anymore these days. All in all the process was pretty painless, and I feel very happy about ditching the last Google service I was still using (except the rare Google query of DDG fails to return useful results)