I'll speak from personal experience sailing around some not-even-THAT-remote places this year when I say: shitty network connections still exist. Rampantly. Even in the US and Canada. Hop on a Starlink dish or even just a cell phone tether somewhere in rural Nevada or at sea in British Columbia some time. Heck, hop on hotel wifi in Juneau Alaska (the capital of that state, no less) - that terrestrial connection in 2021 was so bad that I had lag SSHing to my home server to run mutt and vim. The modern internet was completely inaccessible: attempting to post a picture to Mastodon would just time out.
These are the usecases Google is declaring are not worth accessing their services anymore.
Is there supposed to be some sort of "bougie" implication here? Because my sailboat was anything but - and indeed, most folks who live on sailboats full time (I no longer do, but I did) are riding around in quite modest vessels.
The point isn't "oh use another protocol". Gmail is billed as a full-on product, and especially, they push their web interface. This is them abandoning users. Sure, some folks will fall back to IMAP or POP. But at the end of the day, the company is taking a stance, much as you're taking a stance and I'm taking a stance and all opinionated actions are stances being taken that reflect our characters and values.
These are the usecases Google is declaring are not worth accessing their services anymore.