If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.

I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.

Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.

As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.

It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).

It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.