Surely LineageOS and similar projects will continue to maintain their own, open source version of the dialer and whatever else gets dropped from AOSP.

My OnePlus 6 is just short of 4 full years of use, with LineageOS of course. It’s been great and I’d keep it for another few years if I were able to buy a new, genuine replacement battery; all the vendors I see offering one are dubious. The OP6 has excellent hardware for the price I paid for it back in 2019, excellent software thanks to LineageOS support, all while having Dual SIM/microSD (shared slot, used for second SIM by me) and a headphone jack. Earlier, my daily driver was a OnePlus X which I was also happy with for the same reasons. Now that 4 years of battery wear are pushing me towards replacement, I will jump ship only because newer OnePlus phones have impractical display aspect ratios, way too long and narrow for my needs; I consider a phone’s display to be as good as the largest 16:9 rectangle that can fit into it.

LineageOS is great even without root, but I still recommend using Magisk on it for system-wide ad blocking (via e.g. AdAway) if nothing else.

A banking app may have a simple root check, or a SafetyNet check. You can use shamiko and safetynet-fix respectively to fool these, both have already been linked.

I love larger displays. Easy on the eyes, better gaming and video experience. Still, on many newer phones aspect ratio is a problem for me. If the phone’s screen is something like 21:9 then it’s only really big on paper, since videos won’t fit perfectly, and the text and UI elements of games I play would still be pretty small, since they scale with the screen’s height in landscape mode.

Try sorting by daily top as a workaround until this gets properly fixed.

It’s mostly torrents that are dangerous without a VPN, since as a torrent user you’re also redistributing the content in question, and the peer-to-peer nature of them makes you very visible to copyright trolls.

Direct download is generally much safer. Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but in many countries merely downloading (or streaming) a pirated copy of a game or film is not a criminal offense, and is not in practice vulnerable to a civil lawsuit either.

Avoid torrents, know good direct download sites (these will vary by what content you’re interested in, look around using various search engines to get around DMCA delistings), use rudimentary privacy protections like private DNS and HTTPS-only mode in your browser, and you’ll get far without a VPN.

Tor is also a powerful, free option, but it’s generally overkill for non-torrent piracy and very hard to configure for torrents.

For the record, Genshin actually works well on the Steam Deck, both in terms of usability and performance.