Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Look into GrapheneOS. It's pretty easy to install on a Pixel device if you're willing to spend a few hours on it (might be less, assuming all your USB cables work first go 'round, unlike mine ๐) and it's been a great daily driver for me. You don't have to install Google Play stuff, but if you need it for an app like banking you can run it all sandboxed and control all the permissions. Only thing I lost was Gboard's ability to send GIFs (because I have it sandboxed; I could get it back if I wanted to let it connect to the internet). You might be able to get a Pixel 6a for like $200 soon too, I think I saw something about a sale coming up on the Google store.
Up for GrapheneOS! It's weird that to have a degoogled phone you need to buy Google's ones but so far is the smoothest ungoogled experience I had (I tried LineageOS without GApps, LineageOS with microG and /e/ OS in case you were wondering) Also, since google services are installed in a sandbox you could even have a profile where you have them and all apps that require Google Play separated from the profile you normally use which is pretty cool (even if I'm using them sandboxed just with the permissions I need on my primary profile atm)
can confirm! grapheneos is great, ive had no problems w it