Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless when I actually committed to it. I did a search over my password manager for my old email and just went through the list logging in and switching to the new email. Probably took a few hours at most.

For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host. Cleaned up the few things I missed, and am only left with spam. I still leave the forwarding rule there in case a personal contact or service I forgot pops up, but it has been years without any issue, and I never feel the need to log into gmail. Certain emails are not forwarded I think, despite the "forward all" rule... but nothing I've ever found to matter.

> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most.

That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.

As an alternative to forwarding, you can also configure Fastmail to fetch mail from (and send via) Gmail like a mail client.

> For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host

This is one of the big reasons I switched to GMail when it was new. Most free alternatives like Yahoo would lock forwarding behind a paywall. A very transparent attempt to keep users by force.