Gmail is an email service. Like the fediverse, email is federated.
By changing your email provider, do you really lose anything? You can still contact your friends, contacts and even various customer suports. You also can recieve emails from popular social media apps. If you degoogle from atleast one Google app, maybe Gmail could be the easiest and least life changing one.
While, Youtube could easilly be one of the most difficult to degoogle from. Not like literally but emotionally. Like deep down you know you can find mostly all you might need on something like Peertube but not all the entertainment media like on Youtube. You will also become a social outcast if peertube is the only app you use. You might not understand channels people mention in day to day talk from youtube or references.
If you use exclusively fediverse apps and sites, Chrome could be almost just as easy to replace as gmail, longterm. However If you use Youtube it won’t surprise me that Youtube downgrades your performance and user experience in what ever means neccesary on competing browsers.
Proton.me and mail.com seems to work on many websites including switch online, xbox/streaming services. Also I rarely see this happening can you name some examples that do this email provider blocking?
Oh yeah I meant to say alias like Firefox Relay that uses mozmail.com at the end. I don’t have the websites on top of my head right now but yeah they are a few of them.
I do remember one app specifically called Aminoapps that did blocked tatanota emails but not proton mail. So maybe it’s just hit or miss on whether alternative email providers get banned.