Interesting, thanks for the info. I must have missed this. It doesn't seem completely unfair to not pass your main Google password, and I imagine you still might be able to use generated application passwords if you really need the functionality (maybe).
The thing that is confusing here is you used to have to turn on less secure apps to use app passwords, and the article says that's getting removed for personal accounts. So while they don't say that they're removing IMAP via app passwords for personal accounts, there's a concern they might be effectively removing them it