I have an Lposed module that you can indicate which apps you want to block updates for so they don’t get updated, regardless what any given shop tries. Easier than toggling it off for all those specific apps within each of Fdroid, Droidify, and Aurora.

There’s also Obtanium that lets you do updates a different way as well.

As for removing apps you can do so on any brew as long as you have root privileges. Sometimes you can even without, via ADB unless they’ve prevented it.

So I mean basically Linux phone doesn’t really need to be used as a way of making this an easier thing to accomplish. Root is right away the ultimate solution, and a custom ROM even better.