A more reasonable approach would’ve been to offer custom domains as part of Google One, whose pricing is far more family-friendly.

Eg, Google One provides 100GB of storage (shareable with your family Google accounts) for £16/year. Just let those who want that to link it to custom domains — Apple (iCloud+) and MS (MS 365) already offer this.

That would be a great solution. I would imagine many "legacy free" users are old GMail for Domains users who just want the same Google One functionality of @gmail.com addresses but with a custom domain.

I don't even use my domain name for anything but email anymore, but I certainly don't want to give up the address I've been known by for a dozen years.

As you can imagine, my username @gmail.com gets too much spam to be usable.

Exactly! Or provide a migration path - I went back to a standard gmail account, but the vast majority of my purchases, photos etc are in my old GAFYD account.

Google are going to lose even more goodwill without a migration path.

Please do this Google.

This is what I'd imagine most of the people on Legacy Google Workspaces want.

That would be perfect for me!

This should be done.