That was the internal name for personal paid gmail - I honestly cannot remember the nondescript word combination they called it publicly, but it was rolled into Gsuite which is now google workspace and google decided they wanted to focus on business users instead.
Anyways, basically agree that gmail isn’t going anywhere, just a gmail-related story of people depending on a new flavor of gmail/ google identity that was being migrated messily.
I used this for 10 years or so before realising they'd moved the backends as they were planning the workspace thing and they were separate - you couldn't share between the two, loads of features missing etc .
I think this is a relevant article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-relents-legac...
Anyways, basically agree that gmail isn’t going anywhere, just a gmail-related story of people depending on a new flavor of gmail/ google identity that was being migrated messily.