What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day.

And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.

Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.

Bill Gates famously said "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer" in the 1980s. We could probably do most of what modern computers do with far less than 32GB of RAM, but that assumes that our software is much more optimized for compact runtime than they are.