GrapheneOS seems to be the winner these days.
Then I tried GrapheneOS, which was driven by Daniel Micay, who seems a hardcore security-minded person. GrapheneOS seemed to be working beating AOSP internals into better security shape, and very slowly tackling the apps. So, with GrapheneOS, it seemed I was starting with as clean and trustworthy an Android as one can get (to the extend Android can ever be clean or trustworthy), and in the interim I could add missing open source apps to my install. (Email, maps, SSH, chat, etc.)
GrapheneOS isn't the ideal I could imagine, but it exists, and I feel less violated by GrapheneOS than by other phone in the last ~15 years or so.