simonjgreen parent
I am in favour of the middle ground. Rather than expending effort self hosting email, which while plausible is unequivocally a heavy lift for most, make use of smaller providers such as Fastmail or Protonmail. Just please stop consolidating the internet.
After using gmail for around a decade, I switched to fastmail a few months ago and have been extremely happy with the change.
I still have a lot of accounts associated to my gmail email, but i've been slowly migrating things over when convenient. It has been a much smaller lift than I anticipated and absolutely worth it.
I am also going with Protonmail, not because I can't setup my own server, but because I don't want to take care for yet another server, whose loss (be it by hacking or by my mistake) would be catastrophic for my whole digital life. I will rather pay to somebody else who know what they are doing.