Eh, Americans are pretty similar to that culturally. Using a gun to intimidate someone into not robbing you, or shooting to wound, are both considered bad practice in America for multiple reasons. Instead, I've always been told that if you pull your gun then you must shoot to kill.

I think you're right that it's a bait, but my bet is that this is also their legacy gsuite exit plan. They had mentioned there would be transition plan for people leaving the legacy accounts. I suspect this is their solution: make people set up email elsewhere, then re-sign up with the now externally hosted email and switch their old legacy account to a new essentials account. I guess this avoids Google actually having to create a transition plan for leaving members with more challenging data like photos and music. Not sure how much it benefits google, though, as the email service was already being partially monetized by using google drive space. I assume it's still a bait and the essential service will die off also, as I can't see why they would force it otherwise if they were just going to offer a new free service. Grasping at straws for an idea, maybe there are some truly egregious google photos libraries being used on legacy gsuite accounts, and forcing the transition means the photos also aren't grandfathered as free anymore.