I have the same experience. I find somehow the call blocking is more robust on Samsung. I had no idea that they even had that feature parity.

The perception of Samsung being full of bloat is a misnomer. Can't get rid of lots of Google apps on the pixel and can't change the photo gallery app or the camera app.

I have my own Cloud and don't want to use Google's, and Samsungs software was much more receptive in me de-googling the phone the way I wanted to with my own self hosted photo backup software.

Also I don't have a hand warmer for a phone now.