I heartily recommend Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series. I don't think I've read something by Reynolds that I haven't liked

Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is great. Really any of his are great.

You recommend me a book! I'm into privateer freighter scrapper books!

Stanisław Lem. He wrote a lot of novels & short story compilations, including Solaris, The Futurological Congress, A Perfect Vacuum, and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

Adrian Tchaikovsky

"Shards Of the Earth" Scrappy band of outsiders are trying to fight giant, mysterious machines [?] that destroy entire systems, apparently for fun.

He's probably the best of the new.

Poul Anderson.

"War Of The Wingmen." A fat, lazy space trader is marooned on a plaent where all the food is poison. He'd got to overthrown a few kingdoms to survive. SF classic from an old master

I would recommend "The mote in God's eye".
Fantastic premise with one of the most convincing and fascinating alien races (don't look it up, there are some plot-twists!) as well as some action parts and space battles. AI free and the military is kind of a quaint feudalistic kind of style.

Can't go wrong with some Culture books from Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas , Excession and Hydrogen Sonata (and probably others I'm forgetting) definitely have some big space battles without the overhead of military tropes.

Here is a deep pull from an OG space opera author: E E Doc Smith’s Skylark series:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark_(series)

A lot of stories by Jack Vance (The Demon Princes saga, the Giant Planet, the Tschai Cycle, ...) are space opera but nothing about spaceship and battles in the stories

How close to Fantasy as a genre do you mind getting, compared to Sci-Fi?

The Gap cycle by Stephen Donaldson. First book is hard to read but it's short and necessary. The rest is incredible.

check out the OG space operas, the Lensman and Skylark series by E.E. 'doc' Smith if you haven't already. He also has a bunch of other rollicking adventure tales that are pretty great. You just need to bear in mind the time period they were written in (1920s-1950s)..

Hmmmm.... Neal Asher books can be good. Also Peter F Hamilton. Charles Stross Laundry series is good too.

I’m not super clear on what genre space opera is exactly, but The Locked Tomb trilogy might fit the bill??

I’ve read several privateer/freighter/scrapper books that were amazing. Looking for more of the same.

Try the first books of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga—it centers around a backwoods aristocrat moonlighting as an interstellar mercenary captain.

Wolfhounds by John Van Stry

It does have ai characters but they don't dominate the story at all which is odd given the premise.

Also Theft of Fire by Devon Erikson. Not a space Opera at all, but a very enjoyable read.

Revelation Space is a great series if you haven't read it.