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For a second I thought they might provide a product for all the people recently kicked off the formerly "Google Apps" Gmail.

Sad to see this is the exact opposite.

Will Google allow former G Suite legacy free edition choose the Workspace Essentials?
Probably but it looks like this is lacking Gmail access among other things. It’s in no way comparable to the G Suite product.
I was more worried about having to migrate all my Drive documents, shared folders, etc. etc. than migrating my email tbh. It may be hubris, but migrating email seems like a solved problem whereas untangling years of "Who created this folder? Who has the rights to add me again on a different account? Do I need to transfer ownerhsip of this folder so it keeps existing?" felt like a lot of manual labor.
Email is easy to migrate. If Google let GSuite legacy free account migrate to this new Essentials Starter it is a better solution than having to transfer your data to a @gmail.com account.

This "Essentials Starter" at least has access to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, as well as Chat and Meet. It also has a 15gb of storage per user.

What do you mean? A Gmail account comes with all that and more.
If you have a custom email that's probably more important to you to keep than Google services — it is for me at least.
I think we are not talking about the same thing. You specifically want to not have to migrate your legacy account data outside of email. Even if it means being limited to the resources you get and possibly not getting other Google services in the future as they have historically neutered options like this.

I and the other person replying to you are saying, you can migrate your custom email legacy account to a normal Google account and move your custom email somewhere else as you already have to do that no matter what.

So the difference only lies in whether one believes it is better to have a limited Google Workspaces Essentials Starter account vs creating a new Google account with a custom email address and moving your data there. I personally will take the latter.

If they would let you migrate an arbitrary GSuite account to an arbitrary regular Google user account (or whatever the terminologies are, I hope you see what I am referring too), wouldn't that be a much simpler solution?
I don't understand why they don't just provide a regular Gmail account with a custom domain.

Many people used Gsuite for this and didn't care at all about any other Workspace features.

I just cancelled the subscription on a paid GSuite/Workspace account. The administrator account doesn't go away, and you can select "Cloud Identity" and get some level of user management for free.

It will be hard to know how this impacts on things like peoples Play Store purchases within the context of Workspacex. Thankfully I'm not in that position.

Although I have a GSuite Legacy Free Account (in addition to a paid one), I haven't been running it for family and it's primarily been for email (which is now moved to Fastmail).

I understand most of the hassles are when you're using it as a primary account.

Now I guess the answer is NO.

According to Google Workspace Support on Twitter "there’s no connection between Google Workspace Essentials Starter and the G Suite legacy free edition, it is therefore, not a transition option.”*

Does this make sense to anyone? Why not allow former legacy users to migrate to this new free plan?

* https://mobile.twitter.com/AskWorkspace/status/1489469620985...

Doesn't every Google account, work or private, not already come with access to these?
It comes with less than a Google account — this is designed to be used in conjunction with Exchange.
No Gmail.