My personal phone: Pixel 3a XL. No, I didn't choose the very large size of it. I would prefer a smaller phone. But my wife at some point decided that for her way of carrying the phone, the large screen would be good ... and she quickly decided that she was wrong. So she got a Pixel 4, and I ended up with the 3a XL. Note that the 3a is a lower-cost variant of the Pixel 3. Mine must be about 5-6 years old; my wife's perhaps half a year or a year younger. Mine works perfectly, boring, battery life is about 2-3 days (even after daily carry). No serious damage, except the screen protector has cracked twice and was replaced every time. I don't do anything special about software, no unlocking or interesting kernels. The only "hacky" app I'm using is a file manager, so I can double-click on downloaded files (such as music or PDF files) to use them. One of the nice things about the Pixel ecosystem is: the few times I've switched phones, it is absolutely effortless: get the new phone, log in, and about 10 minutes later all my personal settings and data are on the new phone.
On the other hand, I find Android and the apps for it just annoying. Nothing seems intuitive, settings menus are like the "maze of twisty little passages all alike", cut and paste or editing or typing is annoyingly difficult. When using a Pixel, I can sort of see Google's software development style and corporate culture: It's built by autistic software engineers who like to show off how smaaaht they are, with the target audience being their colleagues. I very much want to move to an iOS device, and fortunately today I'm free to do so.
For about 5 years, I had a second Pixel phone for work (I was a Google employee), and I think the last one was a Pixel 6 or 7. Worked great. With 5G, it has superb cell connection speed, so good that during internet outages at home I used it work work with video calls, editing, as if connected by good home internet. Sort of the perfect phone for me: boring, always work. But also a terrible phone for me, as Android and the Google-provided apps annoy me (see above).
My wife's experience with her Pixel 4 is sort of diametrically opposite. It barely works. Refuses to make phone calls over WiFi. Keeps missing SMS messages when cell reception is spotty (as it commonly is), even when always connected via WiFi. Battery sometimes refuses to charge; battery capacity is down to less than one day. Hangs every few days, requiring hard reboot. I do not know why her phone (with very similar hardware and software to mine) acts so different.
Our son switched from Google-made phones to iPhones a few years ago, when in high school. Part of the reason was that his friends and him did a lot of hanging out at the pool and in hot-tubs, and iPhones are seriously waterproof, while Nexus and Pixel phones used to suffer instant death when touching water. But he has also been much happier with the reliability of his phone, and the few times I've borrowed it, the UI seems much more sensible and intuitive. The only problem the iPhones have had was: they got stolen twice.
