

You could swap out the Pixel+Graphene for say a FairPhone+LineageOS. I ran misc-secondhand-phone+LineageOS for over a decade. Still selfhost everything I need. My family have all their photos upload to my nextcloud instance instead of Google.
My switch to Pixel+Graphene is because ultimately the problem is political not technical. A banking app I needed for work refused to run without the real Google services. It also refused Custom ROMs. I tried a lot of tricks. Also GoogleMaps is the only satnav with traffic information in the route planning. There is other things, but Graphene allows you a compromise of running the Google services, but sandboxed.
The problem is not technical, it’s political. Most people don’t understand the difference between a standard and a monopoly. The law makers are asleep to monopolies and the need for competition in the tech world, so have allow this tech dystopia to happen. Some that are more awake know big monopolies are easier to get things like this story from. Multinational corporation are money machines, they won’t really fight for their users. But they miss the bigger picture.
If you care about all this stuff, there is groups like:
Maybe also https://openuk.uk/ , though they more work with big tech.
The ones I met really don’t know anything else. If you got to the point of being a Windows power user (slight oxymoron), having to start again on another platform is enraging when it seams different for the sake of it. It seams like others are cheating when achieving more using something else. They aren’t playing by the same rules!
Similarly, if you don’t know anything else and don’t know Windows really either, change is scary. Basically humans don’t like change and will fight to keep things unchanged, rather than embrace and utilize the change.