Basic HTML Gmail hasn't changed in years and works perfectly fine for all of my needs for gmail: reading and sending emails. I find the current UI to be quite unusable, but at least there's still the basic html option.
Yep it's great. It loads way faster than IMAP would, I can see more than 40 emails on my screen at one time, and it has a very nice practical 2000s aesthetic with no unnecessary whitespace.