Start at least. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Self hosting, Hetzner, INWX, mailbox/posteo/infomaniak/proton and Ubuntu fix pretty much most scenarios.

I really don’t think it’s any difficult for individual, tech savvy users

It’s really much harder than you’d imagine it’d be before starting if you’re hoping to retain the same level of convenience. I’d say nearly impossible.

I moved my phone to Graphene last week and have spent countless hours getting things to work and finding ways to do things without Google’s various apps and there is always a concession to be made. You can install those G-apps but that’s the whole point so you have to keep accepting things like no RCS in messages, no touch-to-pay, no reliable speech synthesis, a bunch of non-working apps if they rely on the play services, no whole-phone backup and restore, etc. The list is very, very long.

I’m not Google-free on it but with sandboxed and permission-stripped G-apps, I’m hoping I’m not leaking my data to Google.

Apparently “The land of the free” is less free now than Europe.

That is so wrong. It is still one of the super free countries. What people seem to never really have understood: free for corpos, not for you pathetic plebs. You are cattle, not free.