Heck, I own a zflip 6 right now and the ONLY hard requirement out of everything in the article I gone through was the google account. And I know of a way to get rid of it too, it would just break a couple of things.

I had mi phones before and they had only one hard requirement of needed a xiaomi account for developer mode. I circumvented it.

The article isn't just a pathetic piece of writting in general, it's also operating on tip top tier redditor-brained US-defaultism where "Android = Pixel/Samsung". I have no idea why the crowd here is letting it stick around.