You won't go back, it's very well designed. The settings are optional and do not get in your way. You can choose to go full surveillance if you wish by installing Google Play Services
Discussion
That said even the Google spyware is sandboxed and doesn't get privileged access like it does on stock Android
The OS is clean, bare-bones which means better battery performance compared to AOSP (in theory at least)
I only install Google Play apps on a separate user profile. That's proven to be annoying. I wonder if I went overkill on that given the sandboxing.