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This most likely is a pragmatic financial decision. Contextual advertising is generating a lower CPM than data/person based advertising.

Said differently the relevance that can be extracted from your specific email is less than the cumulative knowledge that Google has about you from other sources.

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Gmail ads were no just contextual. Advertisers were able to target people who received email from a particular domain. Can you imagine the power of being able to target customers of a competitor that has been developing their customer relationships for years?

This is 100% conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was this domain targeting (which is what many advertisers were using) that was the thing that Google's big clients were complaining about.

But couldn't the contextual email data be used to supplement the global personal data google already has on you? I don't understand why they would willingly forgo this data.

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