What about the small matter of having to purchase a Google phone in the first place?

I can relate to this, it is what ultimately caused me to leave the field of ecology/conservation. It all felt depressingly pointless.

Not sure I agree about this, in the UK we have some excellent examples of independent local journalism, for example the Bristol Cable that is funded by readers.

These tech CEOs just want to have to spend as little as possible to maintain their platforms. They don't actually care about freedom of speech beyond that.

Maybe this was the case a few years ago, but I would argue the landscape has changed a lot since then - with many more distro options for Arm64 devices.