I wanted to degoogle since Google has been most annoying so far with S21FE. Was thinking of getting Pixel 8a but due to mixed reivews I was looking for other phones. Thoughts on this? Would be also nice if I can get some opinions from people who have the phone as well.
Idk about completely Google-free ones. Most of vanilla ROMs (such as crDroid, ArrowOS, CherishOS etc) do have some pre-included fixes for Google apps because most of the users flash them and I think they use the proprietary version of Monet theming (there are 2 versions of it). Usually LineageOS is what you go for if you want a completely vanilla ROM. I heard they’re considering adding some fixes for Gapps too but I don’t think it’s going to be anything bad or proprietary
Should I be concerned if I am not going to be installing Google Apps (or gapps) or microG?
Depends on the exact ROM (I think they’re only really tested with Gapps) but usually you should be fine. It might be relatively easy to identify a user of ROMs like this because of mismatching device fingerprints (done to unlock Pixel features such as unlimited Google Photos storage and high FPS limit in games) though