I’m surprised that they are surprised by this as well. What did they expect, and why? How much of this is written to imply LLMs - their business - are more advanced/capable than they actually are?

Yep, it is straight-up malware. Just like most mail clients on Android and especially iOS. At least there they have the (terrible) excuse of doing it to save power by having their server push new mail notifications through the OS’ infrastructure instead of having the app wake the device up all the time.