You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!
The author points out that disabling smart features and personalization also disables message categorization, so you wind up with a different inbox, while disabling individual features doesn't disable the most annoying behaviors.
alt Hacker News
The author points out that disabling smart features and personalization also disables message categorization, so you wind up with a different inbox, while disabling individual features doesn't disable the most annoying behaviors.