Reminds me of a situation where I had to do tech support for a pal who had bought a Chinese phone (later learned it was a Xiaomi device). Turns out for some reason the Chinese model didn't have Google play store pre-installed since it is useless in their home market. However to get around this restriction, you had to locate one of the system apps, then search for a specific app inside it that would then install the Google play store.

Also, unrelated but obligatory. Huawei after the Trump ban now offers a de-googled smartphone experience.

There is also microG which I think solves this issue. And I see it's even sponsored by /e/ Foundation https://microg.org/.

That's not exactly correct. There are FLOSS replacements for Play Services these days. See also:

https://microg.org/

I recently de-Googled both my phone and my wife's. Although we try to use FOSS apps as much as possible, there's still a handful of apps we've downloaded via Aurora, all have worked fine. Obviously YMMV but I don't think "most apps won't work" is true.