alt Hacker NewsTrue, but the point is, once you've sucked it up and given up, you may as well get other benefits back in exchange for turning tail. And the iPhone is unfortunately THE primary platform most applications develop for.
Personally, I am willing to just ditch the Android, get an iPhone as a "contact- and banking-only" device, and drag with me some sort of small computer everywhere. I've already dragged a linux retroconsole to a large number of places and have watched videos and listened to music and even edited code through it. May as well do the obvious and call it quits on phones-for-non-phone purposes entirely if phones will be so dedicated to being shitboxes.
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Banking and govt. on a cheap, locked Android. The rest (mail, calling?, SMS, web, on an unlocked Android). You'd need two SIMs, one for the banking/govt google play stuff, and one for the regular phone. My bank does support a physical reader device though. That may eliminate the main Google Play dependency. Open Android will still exists right? But it won't have the Play Store and Services. You could also download the APK on the official phone, then pull the APK off it and install that on the open phone. Won't work if the app requires play integrity, but I think there are alternatives for that. Pretty lame that this is needed, but I'm used to this crap anyway.
I also had a similar thought after these announcements. The main issue is seamless synching that syncthing provides between Linux and Android. There are alternatives like Mobius Sync etc but what I've heard is that they do app-specific sync, not like e.g., sync all my files in this folder X in Linux to a folder Y on iPhone. I'm not an iPhone user but this has always been the main hurdle for me to switch over despite the increasingly locking down of Android.