I abandoned having a free (as in beer) mail account around the time google started doing their own advertising in gmail. At first I went for the ideology approach of fastmail, then tutanota/proton mail and finally runbox (or whatever the Norwegian service is called, which was my favorite by the way), but I just couldn’t live with going from gmail to any of those, and so I ended up with gsuite. When google decided to make having a gsuite for private usage harder, I switched to Office365 where I still have the smallest “only in browser” package.
I have to say that whole outlook isn’t as good as gmail, all the things evolving spam is super easy to handle with policies. I still have my old gmail address forwarding things that google would sort into “this is the relevant mails” part of its new inbox system, and 90% of it goes directly into my “unwanted stuff” or clutter or whatever it’s called in outlook.
As a benefit it also gave me a TB of storage and in browser office, and while I don’t use the office stuff much, I do use one drive to backup my photos because iCloud storage frankly is almost as expensive as the entire office365 account.