On my laptops/desktops/servers, I can rebuild all of my many systems from source, with config kept in git, with a few commands using Nix, and it basically Just Works. Before using Nix, I could reproducibly reinstall my personal Debian environment in 15 minutes with similar uniformly-managed config. When I upgrade software, there's no wondering if I'm going to be forced to upgrade hardware. I'll routinely keep machines running for 10-15 years with no downsides apart from higher power consumption. And when I do upgrade hardware, I'm never forced to change my software environment because of incompatibility.
Meanwhile installing and administering Android is an unreproducible dumpster fire in the vein of of MS Windows - just with tedious swiping instead of tedious clicking. Even my Lineageos/microG phone, with only Free apps, was never really the comfortable experience I expect from a personal computer. Rather it was just something "good enough" that I had to use when mobile. Its camera produced terrible quality photos, as it lacked the proprietary blobs. Even the best-in-class Google-manufactured phones running community distributions with no compunctions about proprietary blobs seem to produce subpar photos. And I'm still not really sure how self-administered Android updates are supposed to work, besides occasionally paving over the whole thing and then going through the pain of manually setting it up again.
That microG phone has since fallen by the wayside due to the 4G deprecation. I've presently regressed to a stock "full take" Android distribution on a no-charge "upgrade" that was sent to me for the 4G deprecation. There are no community distributions for this model, never mind degoogled ones, because of model churn meant to confuse the market. And I don't see the point to throwing $500+ towards a new Pixel (seemingly what all the innovative community distributions want), and rewarding Google for creating this technological pox where 3-5 years of updates is touted as if it's a long time.
A true Linux-first phone is putting a line in the sand of what Freely works today, rather than constantly playing catchup on the shifting sands of what the ewaste-surveillance industry is pushing this quarter. I'm sick of playing catchup, I'm sick of having to choose one failure from (commercial surveillance, no security fixes, upgrade treadmill). The next device I buy to carry around in my pocket will run standard Linux with all its comfortable bells and whistles, whether that is something like Pinephone or Librem, or whether I flip the table on the whole tiny-device-with-touchscreen compromise and just use something like a GPD Micro PC.
My 25+ years of Linux experience has shown me that it's better to compromise on polish rather than compromise on intended functionality and incentives. The Free ecosystem will gradually get better, and my familiarity with it will continually increase. The proprietary offering, which the Android ecosystem most certainly is regardless of the openwashing, will be forever limited by upstream's corrupt primary goal of bootstrapping subjects into Google's (et al's) commercial surveillance nightmare.