I'm currently using an Android ROM without google play services. Android can be made less awful using things like Termux (adds linux utils with Linux style packaging on top of Android).

However, every now and then I find something that makes me lose my cool. For example, in Android 6+ if you mount a USB drive with USB OTG, Android doesn't actually create a linux mount for it. Instead it abstracts it using some API. All I wanted to do was move files from the phone to a flash drive! I would have been happy with a GUI method or a commandline method, but I couldn't find a path for the flash drive which is needed for both. Bloody nightmare.

I think that running those few Android bits that are necessary (i.e. apps that can't be replaced) on top of a proper Linux distro (i.e. SFOS) is generally less annoying than trying to rebuild linux on top of Android, because Android seems to be getting less and less linuxy.

Do you mean hobbyists? We don't write bad software on purpose