sort of this: i treated the Promotions tab as a "unsubscribe from these mailing lists ASAP" tab as soon as the category feature came out

i get so few of them now i removed all those extra tabs and filters a year ago, but it was pretty useful to get my total inbox as clean as it is now :)

Classical AI (i.e. manually-constructed email rules) is much better for this kind of thing, in my experience. You don't get spurious false positives; you can predict every false positive in your head before you even get the email, and if you want you can even add an extra rule to prevent it from happening in the first place!

“Unknown / trusted / spam senders” lists are a basic implementation of this concept.

I, for one, don't use that feature because I use two email addresses. People who know me personally only know one of them, and I use the other for registrations and subscriptions.

I think it's the difference between people that unsubscribe from lists and those that don't.

If you're a regular unsubscriber, your email box is only ever filled with relevant important items.

I do the same thing with my phone notifications. If my phone ever gets a notification, it's something that directly concerns me.

I don't know how people live getting bombarded with stuff all day, but like you said, everyone's different.