My main email is not GMail, but I forward it to a GMail account to get free spam filtering, free backup, and free search. I encourage everyone to do the same.

You don't get spam if you use aliases everywhere. The few that actually get spam can be turned off.

Like I recently had to turn off alias for made4men.no. srsly, signing me up for spam and not removing me from the spam list even after i unsubscribed. You can tell it's a swedish shop that just happens to own a Norwegian domain.

I actually had to do the opposite. I have a filter that catches all messages marked as spam and unmarks them as spam. VERY rarely there's a spam message caught in there. Much more often sth super important that just would have landed in spam if not for my genius spam filter.

How does that help in preventing Google from profiling you?

That’s, to put it plainly, dumb.