The message they're trying to send is not "we think you're stupid" so much as "we know you hate this, let us make it easier."

The problem is that they don't offer a way for you to say "no, thank you, I'll write my own emails", because they are dumping so much money into this thing and if people don't want to use it they can't justify feeding the token machine.

You can turn a lot of this stuff off by having a Google Cloud account and using their "business-class" product, which gives you the power to turn off these features (most of them, anyway) for your "employees". I'm already doing that because I use Google for a bunch of stuff, but if I wasn't, I might switch away from Gmail as well.