It's hard to get by without Google play for many things like maps and banking.

One option is to make a second profile and then enable sandboxed Google play services on the second profile.

So you can have a schizo / crypto profile, and then a hardened normie profile and switch between them.

Essential apps include:

Mullvad VPN

FUTO keyboard

FUTO Grayjay

Signal

Zapstore for keeping apps updated