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.
YouTube is probably the single website I spend most of my time on, but I only use Firefox. I have some 4 extensions to make it usable, not because google intentionally makes it worse, but because unmodded YouTube sucks. They’re ublock origin, dearrow, yt enhancer and sponsorblock.
only 4?
dearrow is new to me, looks like it’s similar to clickbait remover
Unhook is pretty great and return dislike button too.
Forgot the return dislike btn. Even though I mostly just browse the subscriptions tab, I like having videos recommended though, so I’m not a target for unhook.
Removing recommendations is just a small part of it and you don’t need to have it turned on, I use Unhook mostly for Hide Shorts Tab, Hide End Screen Videowall, Hide End Screen Cards.
these are already covered by enhancer for youtube afaik