He falls into the classic convenience trap. He over-emphasizes the convenience he gets from whatever products he’s using (“because Google does have a lot of great products.”) versus the real cost of using them. He rightly identifies the over-reliance on American tech as serious, but then fails to take the steps needed to become less reliant himself because it is inconvenient to him.

Search is an example where it seems that the only inconvenience to change is the change itself (i.e. getting used to a new search engine), because there most certainly are perfectly good alternatives to Google now, especially considering Google search is literal trash these days. Maps is a good example where he might have to sacrifice some convenience or utility - having myself ditched Google Maps a couple of years ago, and getting by perfectly fine, I still had an easier time navigating before. But the additional convenience does not nearly offset the privacy cost to using Google Maps.

His car is a somewhat different story - he’s already bought a car that has Google services built in (not sure to what extent he can shut any of them off, but I guess there are certain things he could do to limit their reach here). What he should take from this is more than anything the consequences of lock-in, and he should become focused on avoiding such lock-ins in future purchases. But there’s no reflection of that, just a “oh well, guess I can’t de-Google myself after all lol”.

And I can’t get rid of Google Assistant even if I wanted to, unless I sell my car where it’s built-in and quite important to my in-car experience.

How the fuck can google assistant be important for the in-car experience. You should fucking focus on driving, and not check anything on a screen, be it a smartphone or infotainment (that shoud be burned down and please destroy touch screen)