Email forwarding seems to work pretty well for me. Just moved to Cloudflare this morning and it only took a minute or two to configure everything. Although I was already using Cloudflare for DNS, so all I had to do was transfer the domain registration, then remove the old MX records from Google and click a button to add the Cloudflare ones.

To illustrate your point about AWS, at my own workplace there are a few AWS people who are actually in our office once a week, sitting nearby just so they can be easily available to answer questions and work with us to design our architecture or assist in troubleshooting issues. I honestly can't imagine Google providing that level of dedicated support.