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.
Yeah, this was my issue when trying to switch to Proton. Even on PopOS, I can sign into my Gmail account and get my email, calendar, cloud storage… They’re just there, in the desktop. Same with my phone. Proton I could get to work with Thunderbird… if I let them run their app in the background. I could subscribe to my calendar on desktop… But can’t add or edit events. Cloud storage access required upload/download from a browser.
It’s the annoyance of switching all my accounts, yes, but it’s also that everything feels disjointed and half-baked compared to Gmail right now. I’ll be checking in on Proton and when they can get 90% there, then I’ll switch.