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The OP is looking for an introduction to free software, so I provided recommendations for what I would give someone looking for that. I wouldn’t deride that as being an “illusion of control” or a feeling of “being smart” because of things the user cannot control. The same reason I wouldn’t deride a user looking to use Ubuntu or Mint as their first Linux distro. You have to start somewhere, might as well learn in a friendly environment.
To answer your statement though on baseband monitoring, you’re right, there’s no way to avoid monitoring from the carrier or a third party with a stingray, short of using a phone without a modem in it to connect to a cell tower. No phone on the market has an open source modem either so you can only guess what it’s doing since it’s all proprietary code. Neither of these reasons would be a reason I would tell OP or any new person to privacy or security to prevent them from learning how to customize their phone or take their privacy back.
OP is looking for a phone focuses on privacy without specifying the target of who they are hiding from. If it’s just commercial entities, an iPhone is the correct choice, if it’s government then things become complicated, if they just want to learn how a phone works then lineage is fine and if they want to figure out how the cell network works they should be using osmoconbb. Their goal is nebulous, they never specified they wanted free software and the answer provided only provides an illusion of privacy and control.
Not specifying the target or not providing a threat model is something a beginner does. I’m trying to help build a bridge, to help the OP bring her power back as she mentioned in the post, and not deriding flawed but good enough options to get them them as “ricing” or acting like this answer is the end of the world because I didn’t consider every single potential act of spying and privacy intrusions into my answer for a beginner.
