I'm not sure I understand this logic. Can you explain your reasoning here? What makes Google different?
Is it just about data security (e.g. you don't care what anyone does with your data as long as they don't leak it publicly)?
It's business is fundamentally about trust, people trusting its services, I feel it offers good data security on its accounts and it offers services that I am happy I don't have to pay for. Almost 2 decades of email services, search, and drive space is something I'm glad I never pay for.
In certain cases I do keep data away from Google, I'll never upload all my photos to google photos, or put my media collection on a google drive, and i'll keep certain documents locally, but for the majority of the ephemera in my life, it's a fine place to leave it.
Nothing about my life is really that important or sensitive that security is a must and I need to be completely clandestine, if I leave a trail of breadcrumbs for someone to use to pipe adverts at me, so be it, but I can always stop them in browser with a good ad-blocker or a network level filter.
If I want that level of privacy I can always go down the proton-mail account route and use PGP or encrypted messaging. Although that's not really necessary when I'm just send my GF a gif of a seal playing a saxophone or deciding if I cook fajitas for dinner!
If anyone has my data, I'd want it to be the one that you can hope is implementing best practices.
Maybe he's American and trusts American companies more. For Europeans, it's tougher: You can choose between being spied on by the Chinese or by the Americans.
The cynic in me would suggest that on a Google phone, only Google gets to peek at what you do, otherwise it's Google plus the vendor. Also - Google, despite being a bit too nosy for my own comfort, at least is likely to have decent security, so this data is less likely to get exfiltrated and end up published (or sold on a darknet).
Additionally, restrictions on things like copyright aren't nearly as draconian in China - last I tried Baidu's cloud drive service they offered a torrent downloader built into the thing. Other speech restrictions are obviously very nasty and present, but as you're not a citizen there's nothing they can really do to you.