The biggest competitors are obviously not European (eg. MS, Fastmail) but there are smaller companies like mailbox.org that offer less polished but functional a

The biggest competitors are obviously not European (eg. MS, Fastmail) but there are smaller companies like mailbox.org that offer less polished but functional alternatives. I'm not saying that those would be a perfect replacement for everything that Google offers, but they get close enough that they might do the trick for a large number of people (which would then give them the income to make further improvements to their platform).