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.
If you have a deep history with gmail then that could make it harder to to replace. It’s very true especially if from important positions you participated in, along with multiple accounts on it which I like to call leaving eggs all in one basket since they are all reliant on that account.
For people who arent quiet as invested in that, and just use it casually which is a pretty big percent could easily replace gmail with nothing to lose and those are the type of users I was thinking about when writing up this post. But I can agree with what you are saying here and that you have a good point.