Yes, this is for push notifications to work. When running a degoogled OS I'd expect to not ping google about my notifications. I haven't heard of a proof that google used it to track us but I wouldn't be surprised. Also, from time to time apps without gapps have problems with google's push for unknown reasons. In order to work any push service needs an external server to ping
As for the IP, this shows something else. But as others mentioned those lookups are mostly guesswork and country ranges