It's here in the UK, not sure about elsewhere, but a sort of standard for exposing financial data to 3rd party providers of apps etc. I don't know too much about it, but linking my banking to other services didn't sit well with me.
Probably worth moving your e-commerce sites off your google, outlook etc. Proton mail would be good. I don't use open banking. Everything is debit card.
"Baby's first threat model" is a little patronising. The specifically asked about Pixel and de-googling and your response is virtually "you know nothing child, go with apple".
I don't trust companies, generally. I tend to trust open source software that is quite well known, as security/privacy by obfuscation is a poor model. If people can see the code, and scrutinise it, they'll find the nasties generally.
By leading, you were asking weird question so only you could get the answer you wanted, and some were weird. Have to tie yourself in some real logical knots to get there.
Finally, no one mentioned second hand hardware. A few years old point I suspect was intended to mean not the newest model. I bought a 6a pixel when the 7 was out. It was £299. It was a good price for quality hardware that could be de-googled.
They ended up not doing it after the anger. If they could get away with it, they would have. If they didn't go ahead with it anyway, then the legal argument looking really shaky.
The last part of your post was a little weird to comprehend, a lot of weird leading the witness sort of questions. You can throw hundreds at me, but I'll give you the only ones that matters...
Do I trust them? No. Do I want to give them my money and activity? No.
I use DDG. I read here that start page had been taken over by an advertising company, and Brave always felt dodgy from day 1, weird crypto stuff and I think the owners previous company may have sold users data.
I think I saw after initial anger, they were saying things were calming down. Maybe they don't want to let it. Maybe they want to expand state operations.
I try to avoid everything with an extra battery on environmental grounds. Wires for headphone, keyboard and mouse.
I absolutely don't care what the everyday jack says. Most have been conditioned by their brands. Apple customers will not just accept their decisions, but passionately advocate for them. Samsung will copy Apple and their users will justify it based on that.
Just because you use it daily, does it really mean it's critical? A bank card can just as easily be tapped, and it's so more satisfying knowing your private data isn't leaking as much.
Headphone jack getting less popular? I'm pretty sure companies don't want to include it so removed it from the models and the consumers had to buy that. Consumers aren't choosing not to have them, they're choosing phones that don't have them because Apple and other big companies aren't giving them a choice.
The problem with the iphone, is that Apple has shown it's true colours in recent years. Scanning cloud documents etc under the guise of finding CSAM. Privacy to apple is an advertising slogan and it isn't as private as you'd expect.
Is it me or a lot of the responses here a little bot like. Looks like anorchestrated discreditation campaign.
What percentage of users actually need GPG encryption? If they really need it, they can find services to do it on.