If you've never used a TLS library such as Go's crypto/tls, that's understandable-- this is stuff most programmers never need to think about. Fortunately TLS does work pretty well: both sides of an encrypted connection will auto-negotiate and pick the strongest cipher that they both support.

TLS libraries do drop old, weak ciphers from time to time. But thanks to auto-negotiating, this will only be a problem if your TLS lib is so out-of-date that it doesn't support any still-trusted alternatives.

Which brings me back to why this story is so strange: "Gmail upgrades TLS library, drops old insecure algorithm that OpenSSL had dropped almost 10 years ago."