Not OP, but I'd assume everyone with the goal of dropping iOS and Android is doing so for philosophical reasons. I still have my BlackBerry KeyOne. Battery life is still measured in days, but GApps bloat has pushed me to Open Street Maps. Literally every single aspect of the KeyOne is better, from battery life to performance to app availability and polish - but opting out of all tracking may be more meaningful to some.

I never liked Android, having owned a few. The hardware is quickly obsolete, interface has this clunky feeling, apps don’t work properly, often because devs don’t see the same rewards as their iOS brethren. And however you spin it, it’s all proprietary sponsored.

A linux phone might have the same problems, but at least its far more closer to the Open Source side of things.

Unfortunately I think AOSP distributions are a long-term dead-end. Unless maybe if there was a hard fork. Or else it's just a scramble to keep up with whatever changes google is making, dealing with unsupported hardware and hoping that whoever maintains the build for you device knows what they're doing, and re-implementing gapps to try to get some mostly broken compatibility.