I'm having a great experience using microG, which lets me selectively enable and disable cloud messaging for every app that attempts to use Google Play Services. microG does not implement the ads and tracking (Google Analytics) APIs of Google Play Services. microG also lets me use Mozilla Location Services to replace Google Location Services, which obtains a location much faster than GPS alone. With microG being free and open source, I trust it much more than the proprietary Google Play Services, even with sandboxing applied.

It's weird that the article doesn't mention microG even once, since it's what /e/ uses instead of the Google Play Services client.