Yep I went through this sad journey with my gmail this week. Got tired of seeing "coming soon" packages cluttering up my inbox, so I looked into how to turn them off. It turned off the categories. Reminds me of the dark pattern used by many apps, where if you turn off notifications to avoid ads/spam, you also lose useful notifications.
I never enabled that and I verified it's not enabled. However I still have the "Happening Soon" section in my inbox that has status of some packages.
My guess is that Smart Features will (along with everything else it does) scan your emails to populate "Happening Soon" with package status, and if you then enable "Turn on package tracking", it will also periodically poll the shippers for those packages to keep the status up to date.
My complaint still stands. I want to entirely remove "Happening Soon" without disabling categories. It's not even the "Google reading your emails" creepiness. I just don't want my UI to be cluttered.
I see. The "Happening Soon" section of the inbox is populated with stuff other than order tracking, such as your airline tickets. So I can see why you'd have to disable the whole shooting match to get rid of it. But I agree that it would be nice for some people if there was an inbox layout setting to just get rid of it altogether.
