I see some core team on this thread, so just wanted to say THANK YOU! Awesome job! Keep fighting for the users!
I'm totally the wrong person to offer recommendations on mobile, but so far it works very well for me, but then, I use almost no third party apps, and none of them are Play store only. My only complaint is the hardware (outside of their control).
I did do about three weeks of research, as I worried that maybe a number of apps wouldn't run on it or needed some form of deep attestation. Didn't find much, OpsGenie and other work apps are happy with the GOS level of attestation provided.
Great to have Google kicked off the phone. So nice to shut off the network permission for any apps that only require an internet connection to serve ads.
One tip from me, if you came from stock Pixel: You can download the default Pixel sounds and set them up like it was. Have a look for "Your New Adventure" online, the message sound is "Eureka".
For those of us who aren't ready to cut the umbilical cord to the mothership, you can also root/firewall on normal android to stop this. In fact I choose to not be able to use banking apps in order to cut out the crappy ads.
It looks like there's an app on F-Droid called "Rethink" that promises to do both firewalling, DNS blocking, and offers a WireGuard VPN. That seems promising, though I must add that I haven't tested it myself.