Like 99% of enterprises do. It does make you wonder whether theres some hidden disruption opportunity for enterprise email, never given it any thought

For the same reason I use Teams, it's what my workplace pretty much forces me to use.

There were workarounds to redirect the mail to Gmail and manage everything from there instead, but they cracked down on them one after another. The last time I didn't manage to avoid it, so now I'm stuck with that piece of crap.

There isn't honestly that many email clients left. What do you suggest they use, Thunderbird,.. and what, The Bat?

Outlook comes with Windows, it works.

What in some sense has me worried is that even Microsoft doesn't really care about native applications anymore. It's rather hard to take a software company serious, when they don't even want to develop to their own native API. The whole thing is primarily a result of Outlook becoming a blood webapp.

Is there honestly any reason why they couldn't bundle the real Outlook, the one they sell to businesses?

Antitrust

A lot of people just use the defaults (OS, Browser, Email Client, etc.)

Because it's absolutely fantastic.

My employer forces me to, why else?