Sony Experia pulled out of North America. Otherwise I would absolutely go the Sony route just for the sdcard slot.
Discussion
Really? Why?
Samsung is a brand I would 1000% avoid. Excluding the abscence of sd card and headphone jack they don't allow bootloader unlocking => no roms. Their cameras are not the best. There is nothing more you would want from a high end phone. I'd only go with them if you want a folding phone. Otherwise check vivo phones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E76CUtSHMrU skip to 5:10
I'm still not 100% sure why they left. But probably it's just a hard market to compete in. America is iPhone land. I absolutely cannot go iPhone again. It's way to hard ro get your photos off a full phone.
The main reason I want samsung is dex. Being able to plug up a phone to a monitor and get real work done is really nice. Plus their camera might not be the best but it's close.
I can't use custom roms because I need to use Chinese input anyways. And I I need spell check. I did grapheneOS for 2 years after 2 years of lineageOS and I'm done. Way to annoying.
Ok whatever you want. Samsung is still shut company. I want to say that it is as bad as apple.
Lots of things I hate about Samsung. Like, I hate that they have a copy of most of googles programs I can't remove. And due to android certification you must also have the Google version. Like password manager. I get 2 request to save my password. One from Google and one from Samsung. All while I prefer to use keepassxc.
I still might go with the pixil 9 pro I'm watching videos about them.
I'd also go with pixel