alt Hacker NewsSimple: Pure AOSP without Google Play Services is garbage as quite a lot of apps openly rely on it and the built-in core apps (phone, messages, ...) haven't been maintained in a while. Most manufacturers (cough Samsung) insist on loading their Android with bloatware. Google's Pixel has barely any bloatware, but polished core apps.
FWIW my Pixel came with all kinds of manufacturer bloat (why would I need an app for Pixel Buds? I don't own any Pixel Buds!) but at least on Google you can get rid of that crap.
On Samsung I've had the disappointing experience of not being able to nuke some of their pre-installed applications. I was under the impression that you could disable any app (even if you can't uninstall it fully) but apparently Samsung did something to prevent that.
For what it's worth, AOSP is not really a ROM anyone uses from what I can tell. LineageOS and its many forks and siblings have better standard apps for launchers, browsers, music players, the works.