Far right populists have been gaining popularity all over Europe for many years. It looks like it's only going to get worse before it gets better again.
The amount of ram was probably the main issue. Everything took forever or the apps simply crashed. Multitasking was completely out of the question as the apps were immediately killed when something else got higher priority.
I actually bought the Pixel 7A just a couple of weeks before the FP5 was announced. This was dumb but my old FP3+ was simply unusable so I really needed a replacement and I felt certain that the FP5 wouldn't have OLED. I ended up selling the Pixel to my sister who also needed a new phone and I got myself the FP5. We are both very happy.
I think it's pretty obvious that the Pixel is a "better" phone when it comes to the general experience from using it. However, I really do feel that this phone is "mine" in a way that I've never had with anything other than Fairphone. "If you can't open it, you don't own it" and all that. As soon as Lineage is released, I will install it but the stock rom is not bad.
I don't think I have the same privacy needs as you seem to have so I can't really give any advice on that front. I don't have adversaries on the nation state or even law enforcement levels so just having control over which non-FOSS is installed is enough to keep me happy.
I'm not sure if I actually answered any of your questions but I felt like my situation could mean that my opinions are still somewhat valuable. Please let me know if you have any questions I might be able to answer.
I used to run Manjaro, too and I was happy with it until it broke one day after an update. Arch had launched the archinstall script by then so I tried it and honestly, it makes the installation too easy for Manjaro to make sense anymore.
VNC is a graphical tool to show a desktop GUI and is far from needed to show the contents of the filsystem. Do you even have a GUI installed on it and, if it's supposed to act as a server, why would you want to?
Since I can see you already got help to solve your problem. Welcome to Linux, you made the right choice.