Reimagining the inbox – transitioning from a list to a visualisation

Hi All, first post here so hope I'm doing this right.

The inbox hasn't really changed for 30+ years. You get new emails at the top, you scroll down to find emails, and, if you want you can organise them into folders/tags.

Yes, Inbox by Gmail and a few others e.g. Superhuman, have created 'smart' inboxes, classifying emails into subcategories such as "Primary", "Updates", or "Social". Ultimately however these are really still just lists.

The last week or so I've been playing around with some new UIs that try and break this paradigm:

     - using email 'tiles' that can be dragged around instead of just being a list
     - multiple inboxes on the same screen that display these tiles
     - "map" view that displays email tiles/threads as a network graph that can be zoomed into or out of, showing greater or less detail

One thing that's struck me is that it's very easy to overcomplicate the UI - either too many elements, or the user has to scroll around / zoom in and out of the network graph to find emails that are relevant.

I do still believe however with recent advances in gaming, graphics, visualisation, and AI/ML, there must be some solution out there that's elegant, efficient, more intuitive, and pleasing, with regards to reimagining how the inbox loooks.

Now on to the questions:

     (1) What does everyone think?
     (2) Has this been done before? If so, by whom? And what were the factors behind their success/failure
     (3) Any thoughts on how to address the problem of the UI being too cluttered?