Was reading an article about the 20th anniversary of Gmail and how the author (and they assume everyone else) loves keeping every email from forever and how nice that is. My experience was quite different.
I was in community college when Gmail launched and was lucky enough to get an invite from another student. I wanted it because it was seen as cool and better than other email providers. I also did the "just archive everything" thing and accumulated tons of emails.
At some point I moved from Gmail to Fastmail and imported no emails from Gmail. I exported everything from Gmail but after looking through some I realized there was no reason to keep them. Then I setup Fastmail rules to auto delete my emails within a year (different rules for different labels, but none are more than a year). I find that's enough time for receipts for returns or whatever, and then I just don't need to keep all that junk.
"What about important or sentimental emails?" you might ask. I save them to a file and store them with other stuff. I still have a saved version of the first emails my wife and I sent to each other in 2010, but there's no reason to keep that in my email provider when I can keep it much more safely with my other important files.
Anyway, just writing down thoughts from a 3am conversation I had with myself.