for the price of the cheapest iPhone se, you can get nothing phone or pixel, Samsung a something with 4,5 years of updates
but if you really go budget, you still get 2-3 years of updates, for the price of a second gen iPhone se(2020) which would also get 2-3 years of updates
yeah, I've always found smaller youtubers doing better
maybe its because smaller ones are more genuine as they are not doing this for money meanwhile largeer ones who have this as their defacto job always have the same narrative, I mean a mkbhd video, mrmobile video sound basically the same they don't talk about long term use of a phone and always give impressions
the only review they have made is mkbhd on why I don't use pixel anymore and mrmobile on his z fold experience
everything else is impressions with cool shots which gains views and gets them a preview unit from companies weeks before embargo
yes, I rooted my old phone to install custom ROM and save the recovery( my Chinese phone would remove custom recovery if I didn't root
iirc, the process was miui->twrp+pixel exp.+magisk+format data then I had a rooted phone but I didn't need the root so I flashed pixel exp. and did a format data again and magisk was gone
root should go away after clean flashing the ROM again as the update guides always say if you want to retain root, flash magisk after flashing ROM
sheets should also work, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't
and you probably haven't read the website in a long while, grapheneos doesn't support/recommend microg as it is an insecure/partial implementation of google services
grapheneos has developed their own sandboxed play services, which act as a regular android app, it doesn't get any special privileged access to imei or whatever stock oem android gives
after installing this through the "apps" app, you can use grapheneos like regular oem android, but with better privacy and security features
I mean it depends on what you call budget
for the price of the cheapest iPhone se, you can get nothing phone or pixel, Samsung a something with 4,5 years of updates
but if you really go budget, you still get 2-3 years of updates, for the price of a second gen iPhone se(2020) which would also get 2-3 years of updates