Well, last week I lost 70€ from trying to abuse new user deals on aliexpress and not being able to relogin to cancel some stupid order (somehow it didn't work and I had to pay the full price) and somehow I accidentaly ordered two items. Now I have two shitty watches I don't even like, which I'll have to sell on fb marketplace (probably with a loss). What I learned from this is to never be in a hurry when dealing with money.
Well, living without proprietary hardware, firmware and sometimes even software is really hard to achieve. You have to use specific hardware which is often very expensive. You're probably fine with mostly foss software and proprietary hardware. If you want some fancy hardware (i ve recently looked into a garmin watch(which is still not terrible for privacy)), you also need proprietary apps, which isn't great, but you don't actually have an alternative.
Laptops can be compared to cars, you can buy an economical car (with higher range and lower costs, but less power) or a sporscar/muscle car (terrible economy, loud, but higher performance)
Human/dolphin/pig i am already good in the intelligence department, but it's never too much or something like a turtle, I would live around 200 years, but would have severe motor problems. Intelligence, time and knowledge are the most important abilities imo.
They are cheap and if you don't need an expensive product, they are mostly fine, but I got a free powerbank with some crappy teen magazine (when I still ocasionaly read those ad filled pieces of shit) and it died on the second charge.
Xiaomis and some other chinease brands have decent custom rom support, but no grapheneos and no bootloader relocking (except some oneplus phones)