Yes, I know what's the point. But how do you avoid putting all your eggs in one basket? You can't host your email on more than one "provider" (including self host), and the vast majority of important services that you link your email to (bank, digital identity, taxes and other government services) does not allow you to have more than one linked to it; which means, that one goes down, you don't have one. Sure, I can give my accountant and my lawyer a second email address, hosted on a different provider, but that poses two problems: 1. how are they gonna know when one is working and one isn't? It's not like you get a notification if your email didn't reach most of the time, it just drops; 2. if you always send all emails to both addresses, now two providers have my data instead of one (of course excluding if one is self hosted). And you also need to always keep in mind that for all things important: one is none, two is one; so you should really have 3 addresses on 3 different providers according to that, which brings us back to the problems above. (and I'm not even mentioning the confusion that it would generate if you don't manage to get the same name with every provider "Wait, was it [email protected], or was it [email protected]? Or was that fastmail?")

As I said (literally in the second sentence), I don't rely on Google for everything, as you mention. I don't actually rely on Google for anything other than gmail, and of that I am also unhappy. The point I was trying to make is that there aren't really alternatives, and I was hoping someone might come out with a suggestion about how to overcome that problem.