Comment by wishfish

Pixels with GrapheneOS are your best and safest bet.

In my specific case, I couldn't use Pixels because the terrible PWM on the screen was painful to me. Bought a cheap Motorola G Power 2024 with an IPS screen. Never logged into Google. Used Obtanium and FDroid for most things. Used Aurora for the one Play-only app that I needed. Running Netguard (a non-root firewall) with a whitelist so almost nothing phones home. Deleted or disabled almost all the non-essential built-in apps.

I like the Moto but wouldn't recommend it due to the lack of OS updates. But this setup could be easily duplicated on almost any Android without needing root or roms.