Moving email addresses out from one provider and creating another one is more difficult than moving phone numbers (in the latter case, number portability could help, if available).

What exactly can an average/common end user do for such incidents, even if it is to avoid them in the future? I use different passwords across accounts, with all of them being somewhat complex or very complex.

I have looked at a few different paid service providers before, but they're all very expensive. Expensive for me is anything that charges more than $20 per year, or worse, charges that amount or higher for every single email address/alias on a domain. My use of email for personal purposes is writing about a handful of emails in an entire year, but on the receiving side, I get a lot of emails - most of them somewhat commercial in nature (like online orders, bank statement notifications, marketing newsletters I've explicitly signed up for, etc.). I also have several email addresses, each one used for a different purpose and with some overlap across them.

It seems like web hosting has become extremely cheap over time whereas email hosting has stagnated on the price front for a long time.