That's weird. I use Gmail regularly and did not experience anything like that; it works just the way it did for the past 10+ years. And auto categorization still works just fine, and no AI summarizing my email or trying to write my drafts. I wonder what difference we have in settings.
Also, not to be disrespectful to the OP, but seems quite an... overblown reaction. To each their own, though.
This seems to be caused by "smart features" enabled in settings, and can be turned off. When they were introduced they popped up in gmail and you could choose to accept or reject, I of course rejected all of them (nothing good could possibly come from accepting), so I've never had any of the issues mentioned in the blog post.