Where are these OEMs that allow proper bootloader unlocking on most of their range?

Google, Sony …? Huawei stopped doing it, Oppo & Samsung doesn’t last I checked.

(If you buy a suitable device) You don’t have to use the preloaded OS (see Graphrne, Lineage etc).

There is a db migration command that I used to do the same thing, was pretty painless, just needed to run that and then update the config iirc

The linked article — and others — explain that in Android 10+, (a) executable binaries can no longer reside in a read/write directory, and (b) access to /sdcard will go away. Simply put, these changes destroy my application’s ability to function, and that of Termux as well.

That sounds like proper security to me? Inability to access the user’s storage is a bit lame, but they’ve been moving to nicer APIs for that anyway.

Android is a mobile phone OS, not desktop / embedded Linux.

One thing that people miss - either out of ignorance, or because it goes against the narrative - is that systemd is modular.

One part handles init and services (and related things like mounts and sockets, because it makes sense to do that), one handles user sessions (logind), one handles logging (journald), one handles networking (networkd) etc etc.

You don’t have to use networkd, or their efi bootloader, or their kernel install tool, or the other hostname/name resolution/userdb/tmpfiles etc etc tools.