That gives you some control, but because lineage is mostly just using upstream android, and google's "contributions" to AOSP continue the overall decline of android, and the majority of apps adhere to google's behavioral demands of the play store, even lineageOS gets worse every year by way of it not being a hard fork of what was once a good OS.

Not that I have a solution to the problem. Just saying the current and foreseeable future state is that smartphones are past their glory days, and the platform defeated itself.