There’s work being undertaken in this area. Using Gmail and Outlook you can keep Emails synchronised, and you can now also use variables when you send emails. You could use custom fields (include free text) and new manual triggers to achieve most of what you want.
I would suggest adding into your rules something like “add comment 'manual trigger was run and email sent” to know you sent an email 
Good Luck!
P.S. I fully support your idea of removing all the garbage things like social media icons etc from becoming attachments. Maybe with all the AI enhancements this will become more likely in time.