Only anecdotally, but a friend of mine has been complaining about his 6a for at least 2 months now, saying the device gets sluggish and he encounters more bugs with every update. My mom reports similar things with her 7 Pro. So if GrapheneOS isn‘t important for you, I would skip Pixels for now. The Nothing 2a looks really good though.

Did the same thing and never looked back. Getting what my mother got as a nurse after 30 years in less than 4 years in IT is insane.

Googles implementation of RCS, the one they are pushing as standard, is indeed proprietary