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Yeah that tracks
(feddit.nl)
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It doesn't sound like anything except trying to sell something to tin foil hat people.
SMTP is still an open protocol, the ONLY reason you're able to email other servers is because it's an open protocol.
Here's the RFC for it.
Here's the one for SPF and here's everyone's favourite "I don't understand it, so I won't implement it, dammit why is Gmail blocking me? This is all big techs fault!"
"oh but what about the weird protocols Microsoft uses for Outlook! They're not proper protocols!" You mean MAPI(RPC\HTTP) and ActiveSync? Well, RPC was built because the idea of a client constantly hitting an IMAP or POP, CalDEV and CardDAV in 1990 seemed like a poor use of resources. ActiveSync is about pushing email to devices with very low resources which don't have the power to constantly be polling a sever. Neither of these protocols affect SMTP, they are client protocols which were not thought about during the 70s and 80s when servers were logged into directly with terminals.
Both solve legitimate problems. You actually have Microsoft's blessing to go build with either protocol because both are documented. Microsoft would probably love for you to improve on them because they are worked on by the engineers who care about protocols and performance. They do exist. But apparently being offered that opportunity is not good enough for the open source community because, while you will find a handful of projects with open source implementations of these, according to them IMAP is perfect.
In Dylan Beattie's excellent talk on the subject of large email providers, he makes the point that a perfectly open system will be exploited by assholes. There's a reason toad.com is blacklisted. It's not a perfect system, but compatibility comes with massive compromises. S/MIME is a kludge and if anybody really could think of a way to improve SMTP it would not be big tech that's stopping it.
ON A SIMILAR AND EQUALLY IMPORTANT TOPIC: Big tech isn't blocking Matrix adoption or XMPP. Maybe when they're a bit older, but they're not currently scalable or robust enough to take on proprietary solutions.