My intention is to buy the cheapest smartphone I can reasonably get as I need to use a phone for professional reasons; the company uses Whatsapp and other applications I do not want to have occupying space in a smartphone I use for my personal life.

I've been loading my phones with FOSS applications from F-Droid for years now but I am aware the loop is tightening and continuing to do so is becoming more and more difficult.

Ideally, I would like to keep this phone as much as possible exempt from connecting with Google. This means I don't intend to load an account on the phone and instead load F-Droid and Aurora to get the software I want to use.