This is correct but also a little misleading: Google gives you a choice to disable smart features globally, but you end up tossing out things you might want as well, such as the automatic classification into smart folders in Gmail. It feels very much like someone said " let's design a way to do this. That will make most people not want to turn any of the features that will make most people not want to turn it off because of the collateral damage"
(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)
Google now "helpfully" decides that you must want a summary of literally every file you open in Drive, which is extra annoying because the summary box causes the UI to move around after the document is opened. The other day I was looking at my company's next year's benefits PDFs and Gemini decided that when I opened the medical benefits paperwork that the thing I would care about is that I can get an ID card with an online account... not the various plan deductibles or anything useful like that.
I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the UI around, but now there's a button that asks if you want a summary instead of generating it automatically.
(I desperately want to disable the AI summaries of email threads, but I don't want to give up the extra spam filtering benefit of having the smart features enabled)