Samsung phones are the most bloated pieces of shit I have ever seen. Mine came with an app just to view the msn.com web site and it couldn't be uninstalled. You have google and samsung in a tug of war over every single thing the phone does. I thought my home button was breaking because of how unresponsive it was, but it turned out it just waits for a sequence to trigger such and such unwanted AI assistant or whatever the hell. It's a crapshoot whether you accidentally launch google assistant or bixby or some other crap service you never even heard of.
There are touchwiz sound effects that I hear in public and to this day it sends a chill down my spine because it brings me back to so much miserable time spent with that abomination of electronics.
Heck, I own a zflip 6 right now and the ONLY hard requirement out of everything in the article I gone through was the google account. And I know of a way to get rid of it too, it would just break a couple of things.
I had mi phones before and they had only one hard requirement of needed a xiaomi account for developer mode. I circumvented it.
The article isn't just a pathetic piece of writting in general, it's also operating on tip top tier redditor-brained US-defaultism where "Android = Pixel/Samsung". I have no idea why the crowd here is letting it stick around.
On Samsung phones you can skip making a Samsung account. All the Google bits still work and it's basically the same as having a Pixel, except you'll have a few unused apps, a different camera and phone app and a very slightly different UI.
I had to guess arcane adb permission commands to stop a 2025 Samsung tablet from nagging the user about creating a Samsung account. It just kept showing up multiple times a day. But nice enough hardware with the promise of long updates at a reasonable price.