I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.
Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.
Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
My Xiaomi has no adverts.
But then the Samsung S22 I had before didn't have adverts. Certainly didn't come with McAfee.
I have a Samsung and I've never seen such ads.
The kind of ads they are talking there in the article would be in cheap Chinese phones in the Android world I think.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.