Zoho has a lite email plan for $12 per year per user. I can put my whole 6 user domain on Zoho for the same price as a single Google Workspace user and the loss of things like Google Drive aren't really a loss in my opinion because I don't trust Google enough to use them.

The $6 per user per month price point is pretty high for users that want basic email.

Your ProtonMail account most likely includes access to ProtonDrive. Proton's services are also encrypted at rest. So for cheaper, you support a company fighting for user privacy. $72 for GMail is unreasonable considering you are also the product by merely hosting your data with Google.