iCloud mail + the default Apple Mail app has worked fine enough for me for a decade.
What does Gmail offer that you can't get on other services? (honest question)
Gmail's mandatory phone number requirement upon registration and inability to get unique aliases (iCloud allows 3, so you can have 4 addresses per account at a time, and without the "baseaddress+" prefix which self-defeats the point of an alias) turns me off right at the start.
> Gmail's mandatory phone number requirement upon registration
It's not always mandatory. I don't know what the heuristics are, but I've managed to create a couple new Google accounts (non-gmail, for dev purposes) during the past couple weeks without them being tied to a phone number.
What does Gmail offer that you can't get on other services? (honest question)
Gmail's mandatory phone number requirement upon registration and inability to get unique aliases (iCloud allows 3, so you can have 4 addresses per account at a time, and without the "baseaddress+" prefix which self-defeats the point of an alias) turns me off right at the start.