Unless people notice that they just built lots of useless datacenters and push back towards a mainframe + terminal setup, because ah sorry, modern software just runs much better that way, and you can save money on our inexpensive laptop with subscription model

There is a difference between security and privacy or freedom of use. Locking down the device to only allow a subset of apps that Google has some control over (by requiring developers to register) is a measure that can increase security, even though it obviously takes some control away from the end-user.

The fact that the play store is not exactly known for exceptionally high standards w.r.t. malware, or that there are lots of valid concerns that come along with a company controlling who is allowed to supply apps for the device is a different topic.

Interesting that you mention this, as I also switched to Fastmail recently and got more spam than before, but after marking it as spam for some time it now died down I think. This may also be a symptom of changing providers, where the previous provider knew the kind of spam I tended to get from past years, while Fastmail needed some time to get up to speed.

Fingers crossed that the experience will be the same for you.

There was a comment in a different thread that suggested they may respect the robots.txt for the most part, but may ignore wildcards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975726

Maybe this is worth trying out first, if you are currently having issues.