You always have a choice. You can ditch your morals entirely, give up, be subservient to the capitalists and give your identity over fully to the system like the good little consumer slave you are and enjoy your normie life looking at your normie phone and toss us all out as tinfoil-hatted weirdos who almost convinced you to make your life worse for the sake of self-sufficiency, independence and privacy.

No one in the real world will ever know, care, or judge you. Only you will know that you gave up, that every location you exist in is known about by someone behind a monitor being overseen by fascists. Every day! You can live with that, right? That's a small thing to give up in the grand scheme of things, isn't it? At least Youtube loaded today, right? It's all worth it, lol.

Just remember to type "thanks" in google keyboard whenever you want them to know you appreciate them. They log it.

Honestly, smart phones being less useful in daily life is probably a good thing.

Having not used default Android for many years now, what makes GrapheneOS worse (aside from a few apps not working - which isn't an issue I've had, fortunately)?

There's a thriving used market with significant discounts if you're willing to go 1-2 models back from the latest ones.