I agree with you totally that it’s dumb to judge someone by their email domain, and I hate Google more than life itself, but I think you’re way underestimating how much better Gmail was than literally everything else on the market for close to a decade. I believe their initial storage on a preview account was 1GB, and it increased on a second-by-second basis; meanwhile other providers like AOL and Yahoo had something like 100MB if you were lucky, with little to no spam filtering to speak of, because they were made for a time when the people who would be using free email accounts would log in once or twice a day, check their email, and sign off the same way they did with paper mail. They also allowed 100MB attachments (which eventually ballooned to over a gig), which was insane; many providers offered less storage for attachments than a floppy disk did, necessitating sending multiple emails with split zip files or individual files from a directory to get a file to someone remote. You also had to do everything one step at a time, so if you had ten files to send you had to click compose, write a message, wait for the file to upload, send it, then start the whole process over again ten times.

Obviously if your AOL email was fine for your needs there was no reason to change (and there certainly are people who treat AOL and Yahoo addresses with ignominy), but it’s also not fair to make it sound like it was a totally surface-level change that society was pushing down your throat just because it was new or something. It’s like saying it’s ridiculous for someone to expect you to buy a car when your old mule can you back and forth down the street to work just fine; it might be true for your situation and you shouldn’t be looked down on for it, but that doesn’t mean most people wouldn’t be better served by the car.