Yeah! The practice is called drive shucking (kinda like Oysters) and you just need to be considerate of the limitations. The drives often end up cheaper, but lose warranty support once they're shucked. They'll also occasionally be slower than a normal drive or have an odd connector, but that is rare since it's usually cheaper to go with something 'off the shelf'. If you Google it though you should usually be able to find the handful of drive SKUs they'll use in whatever external you're planning to shuck.
Google still owns the ecosystem. They want to roll a new packaging system that depreciates apks and forces play store installs or Google based certificate pining? They'll have 90% market capture in a year. It's like using Opera/Edge/Etc and feeling safe from the decisions Google makes because of it, but they're writing and designing Chromium upstream so they still own the agency and the choice (See Manifest v3). Given two companies both preventing me from owning agency of my own device, I'll pick the lesser of the two evils and in my eyes that is currently Apple. I do hope to have a mobile operating system akin to Linux someday, but graphine os or any android dirivitive is not the solution, it just takes away my agency while they further the problem.
I'll de-apple when we get a viable alternative to Android. As is Google has far too much control over the entirety of that ecosystem to call it workably open, and if I'm going to choose between two proprietary vendors I'm going to choose the more reliable one with a business built around consumer interest instead of ad-company interests.
The whole point of the place is anonymity. This enables people to do things they otherwise wouldn't, particularly when it comes to the treatment of others. How have you not noticed this?... Like have you taken 15-20 minutes and actually given this any thought or are you just going off of emotion?
To be fair, men would get near the same response. "Stupid bitch slut Ken". The hate is the same, only the names change. The internet is a hateful place with a multitude of people willing to step up and shit on you for expressing any sort of individuality or emotion.
Morals and principles are all good and dandy until you're staring down daddy Google (who can take millions in losses without blinking an eye) offering you a choice between a large check or competition with a business entity that doesn't need to be profitable . There's not a lot of people in the world who could stand up to that, even fewer so that would want to when the alternative is a worry free life sitting on whatever millions Google paid you while sipping Mai Tais on your private island.
The antitrust machine hasn't had its scheduled maintenance for a few generations. It's gonna take a little while to spin up.