The latest Jerboa update has been occasionally/inconsistently sorting by subscribed/old for me... but I haven't yet found a reliable way to replicate it in order to submit a bug report. Maybe this is happening to others, they're replying to old posts, and the posts are moving into "hot" because of the activity.
It will really depend on use case. The most straight forward one is using LineageOS and F-Droid. With more specifics, I can give you a better fitting setup.
Yeah IDK if you are even able to get the bootloader onlocked for your version. Regardless, there is still a lot that you can do with stock. You can disable most of the Google stuff through ADB and install F-Droid. Neo store even has backgroud updates for Andrpid 12+ IIRC. Here is a short guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/jqxe1u/tutorial_how_to_degoogle_any_android_phone/
I can't vouch for performance or update breakages though.
LineageOS with f-droid has been great, though an unexpected downside is that the One+ I have has 2 battery cells for sake of fast charging. Ironically, it charges faster since moving to LineageOS, but it's not optimized for this phone, so the battery life of my phone is deteriorating quickly