I have a Pixel 7, stock Android 14. It is my only phone and I love the stock system. But I am trying to gradually ditch Google and its services, for reasons well-known in this community and Lemmy in general. How much would I gain/lose using a custom ROM with/without GApps?
Update: Switched to GrapheneOS, no regrets :)
My 2 cents is that you usually need an unlocked bootloader so you can load xposed and get privacy apps that spoof or block certain permissions per app. That is the unconditional indispensable killer feature for me. Sure, using this stuff isn’t 100% bulletproof but I’m at the very least making my information more expensive to harvest and at most making it so that governments and corporations have to hire actual/better hackers to steal my info.