There are phones that actually can give you software freedom. The Pinephone and Librem 5 can both run mainline Linux with very few blobs.
Just don't count on it to wake you up, the alarm clock doesn't always wake the phone on Manjaro+Phosh.
She just upgraded to an iPhone 12 so we'll see how much time goes by before she needs one again too. Luckily Apple is making one now, so hopefully it will work better than the third party ones with respect to using the lightning port pass-through, which sometimes fails.
If needing more battery time were the only thing stopping me, I'd be on a PinePhone today.