I did try phoneless for a few years, except for a dumbphone that I kept at home for the rare call or SMS 2FA.

The biggest factor that forced upgrading was poor call quality on the dumbphones I tried. (And this was really forced by bombing a particular important phone call because I couldn't be understood well.)

Then, once I found a smartphone that I kinda liked (GrapheneOS, after Apple sold out on surveillance), there were reasons to start carrying it. Rather than simply keeping it in a drawer at home.

But fortunately not sufficient reason so far to go full Google Play.

Email, Web, maps, authenticator, camera, and calls are all things I sometimes could use when out.

Though I normally don't have to have any of those, but I've been experimenting with it for a year or so, and seeing whether it's worthwhile.

Because obviously people want to enjoy technological usefulness (i.e. navigation, payments, communication) and automation while preserving dignity and not being spied like a bunch of ships.

If you are going to use a desktop instead, you are hurting your security significantly. Traditional desktop OSes like Window, MacOS and Linux desktop lack a sane security model with a mandatory app sandbox with fine-grained permissions. They also heavily use memory-unsafe code compared to modern OSes like Android OSes and iOS and lack modern exploit mitigations. Only daily drivable productions grade desktop OS with security in its foundations is ChromeOS.