Hmm I have a pixel 7 and don’t have issues with Bluetooth. Notifications work fine with sandboxed play services installed (although I opt not to have it because I prefer not to hear dings for notifications every few mins).

The updates are pretty unintrusive imo and show you the devs are pushing out real work frequently.

There is NFC, but no Gpay, that’s true. I don’t want google tracking all my purchases anyway…

I feel you though, my first few months I kept wanting to go back to iPhone, so much easier and intuitive. But I guess security/privacy have a price.

Just wanted to share an alternative pov for folks considering going down the more privacy/security path.