But largely because I rarely use mail clients at all aside from gmail on my phone. So many jobs don't have their own mail servers, and I'm not particularly interested in running a personal one either.
I do, however, occasionally back up and clear out my old gmail messages. I might consider using a CLI client for that, if it was 5-minutes-or-less levels of easy to get started and write a script for. Otherwise I'd just use Thunderbird.
Not that I particularly like thunderbird, I'm really not a fan of the UI, but it works.