>It also seem pretty nippy to me

OK. (my experience since the redesign is the opposite.)

The TLS overhead is pretty negligible for gmail. Even though there are a lot of steps here it is only 2 round trips for the handshake. Gmail will also use TLS 1.3 (this is 1.2) if your browser supports it which cuts that down to one round trip.[0]

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning-resources/tls-1-3/