alt Hacker NewsI can heartily recommend going into your Google settings and disabling the global "smart features" option. It removes a huge amount of crap all at once.
For GMail, go to Settings -> General (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general) and scroll down to "Smart features" and disable that.
Then go to the next option, "Google Workspace smart features" and disable them across your entire workspace with 1 or 2 more toggles.
Finally, just switch to Fastmail or something. :-)
I found the blog post a bit annoying because it was clearly trying to win internet points rather than actually solve a problem. What you wrote above would have resolved the issue in a couple of minutes, faster than moving over to another email provider. I found all the Gemini integration into consumer products super annoying as well and disabled/unpinned all of it months ago the day I noticed it and thought "wth is this annoying thing". Now, if/when Google removes the option to disable, this blog post would be much more impactful IMO.