Yes conversation view is where if there's an email thread with, say, 8 replies, you still just have one "row" in your list of emails, and clicking into it reveals (usually) the most recent message with the others below.

I fucking hate it, passionately. Each email is its own communication and needs to be reviewed and addressed individually.

In like a personal conversation it's sort of tolerable but in a business context I can't stand it, it's insane that there are clients that don't let you turn it off.

As for me I use the gmail/workspace web interface for the most part, and no I don't like it but it's workable. For my main work email I also keep open a window to a client called "Mailstrom" which is stone cold simple and works great for the one thing I can't live with out, which is the ability to very quickly just see all emails from a sender, or with a certain subject.

When I get behind and have 200 emails to get through in an hour that ability to limit/sort is invaluable and I don't understand why gmail still can't do that.

The other email I subscribe to is Clean Email, which is basically OK but is the best one I've seen for unsubscribing to stuff and seeing which mailing lists I'm on and so forth. I log in to that one every week or so and use it to get out of mailing cadences I've found myself involved in.