I find Gmail quite functional. Yes it creeps me out that I see ads around the net for things I mentioned in email, but Google has their fingers in other aspects of my phone and online presence anyway. They provide services that are useful to me, for no money, so I tolerate them siphoning off some of my digital wake. It's also pretty hard to avoid.
My main personal email is from smaller provider that doesn't do that stuff, to the best of my knowledge, but it costs some money, and is way less functional.
OTOH, I work for a medical-adjacent human services non-profit, and needed to set up a remote meeting with a small group from our company and folks at a local hospital. Google Meet would have been the default, but the hospital people said "we don't use Google products". There definitely are segments of the world that don't accept pretty much anything you can think of.