FWIW I did the opposite leap and felt the opposite way- I really disliked workplace’s stream of seemingly randomly sorted information compared to e-mail lists I could filter, control, and search better. I really dislike workplace as a store of institutional knowledge. The chat was definitely way better than hangouts chat though.

I also felt like a lot of the developer tools looked nicer than their google counterparts at the surface but had major reliability problems under the hood where you would need to do a lot of turn it off and on again style operations.