The fight against encryption continue to this day and while https is now ubiquitous, large-scale cdns makes it somewhat a moot point and emails are still largely plaintext.
But people's private digital communications have largely moved to platforms like WhatsApp and Messenger which enjoy end-to-end encryption. Email, at least between major providers, today enjoys TLS over the wire while being sent.
I'm sure there are various flaws and weaknesses and maybe even backdoors, but trying to make it sound like we lost the fight for encryption because emails are in plaintext is rather disingenuous.
The article last week (assuming you're referring to this [1]) involved users consenting for Netflix to see their messages. A user from the 90s could have made the same mistake sharing plaintext emails.
They aren't open source. For all we know they have backdoors.