The thing is that Apple is even worse when it comes to its walled garden practices and locked-in bundled software. For example, in Android you can at least choose amongst alternative apps for SMS, etc. And some are even open source, and available in the official store. But in Apple devices you can't compete with iMessage, by policy. It's simply not allowed. Even from a technical standpoint it's not possible either, since they don't even offer an API for a third party iOS app to handle SMS/MMS/RCS. And that's just 1 example.

So you are jumping from the pan to the fire if you go from Android to iOS. Even if you are ok giving up the "sideloading" aspect, you are still worse off with Apple anyway.

If it has Google Play Services, it will be affected. Custom ROMs like Graphene OS and Lineage will keep working. The problem is if app developers and/or most of their users don’t use a custom ROM, it will likely push them out of Android app development. So while it is possible for some users to avoid direct impacts of this change, the overall fallout will be unavoidable.

Its literally not possible to have a top tier phone unless the company can pre order like 10m chips directly from TSMC. No small company will ever be able to do this.

If you want a top tier phone from a non mega corp you will never get a phone. You have to chose some sacrifice for freedom or stick to the mega corps that will always seem to control you

You could also move to a degoogled android phone or a linux phone

It's interesting to me that there is no thought at all to move to "neither". Of course, that is what they count on, people not willing to give something so perceived important up.

I recently lost my phone for a few days. Until I found it, it was annoying, but life still worked. Of course, it's a major drop in convenience, no doubt, but I would've likely been fine without either Android or iPhone.