There are some people for whom "The government is literally after me, personally" is a valid threat model. There are some people for whom "Google employees with privileged access to Gmail are conspiring to be after me, personally" (one assumes there's a two-person rule for access to individual inboxes or deploying code that scans inboxes) is also a valid threat model.
However, those people should consider that the government will be willing to use either software 0-days or algorithmic 0-days to attack them (see e.g. Stuxnet taking out Iran's nuclear program using a previously unknown method of generating SHA-1 collisions, that looked kind of like how the academic community knew to generate collisions but with a different fingerprint), in the government case. Or that any interaction with anyone who uses Google must be avoided, in the Google case. See e.g. https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
For normal people (which includes me and probably everyone else commenting here)? Google seems at least as likely, probably a tiny bit more, to protect me from threats like "A personal relationship has gone bad and someone who isn't a government and isn't Google is trying to impersonate be me" or "I don't want to lose access to my email" (remember that availability is a part of security!).