People should diversify their accounts. If one is closed for whatever reason it won't impact their entire digital life.
The reason for all this cloud stuff is simplicity! Why have two services when Google/Apple/Other combines all your stuff into one.
Almost no one will frequently use multiple services like iTunes and Google Play, e.g. you aren't going to buy a movie from iTunes then buy the same one from Google Play just in case Apple pull the rug out from under you.
Same with email: I have a few addresses but my primary one (99% of the time) is tied to outlook.com.
We have allowed it to happen: We own nothing these days, we just rent stuff.
Open a Gmail account and get it to collect all your email from outlook.com. Also, set up mail forwarding so all your outlook.com email goes to Gmail. (Third backup: a desktop email client.)
I do this the other way round: I use Gmail as my main email address (with my own domain name) with everything forwarded to outlook.com, where sweep makes it really easy to clean up.
It takes a small amount of effort, but it stops me from worrying quite so much about the catastrophic effect of having more than a decade of Gmail deleted...
My mum or my sister couldn't do any of that stuff as they wouldn't know where to start.
As it happens, I use Outlook client on my laptop and desktop machines so I have a local copy of my emails should it all go to hell but I could still lose my primary email address.
As for Gmail... I would rather swallow my tongue than let them near my emails (not saying much considering I use Microsoft at the moment, I know) :)
Understood. I was one of the first adopters for Google Search and then Gmail, but my impression of Google was a lot different from what it is today.
The best I can do at the moment is distribute my eggs over many baskets, but I agree, that's not as simple as going all-in with one of the big cloud ecosystems.