I love gmail, use it every day. But the chat in the paid corp version of email is so painful. I hate it with a passion. Gmail also now has the stupid left side bar where it doesn't show the gmail folders unless you click first. I wish gmail chat would just copy slack.

I would honestly like to know more about how to make it handle email chains. My work is happily quite email free but recently I've been involved with a company in my private life and I'm finding the email chains in Gmail incomprehensible -- the old emails aren't folded; I seem to have to scroll past millions of copies of the same email signatures with images in the signatures, as well as tons of quoted text from random copies of the group conversation at earlier points in its life, trying to hunt out the "real" last email. Is this normal?

No, this is not normal in my experience using only gmail for all my companies for about a decade.

Probably just one person using an email client is breaking its ability to collapse emails? In my experience it was perfect at collapsing emails.

Maybe it's a setting an admin disabled, if it's literally every email chain.