That's a decent complaint, but making that a deciding factor for which smartphone to buy seems like shooting yourself in the food because the cheese was too orange-colored when choosing a sandwich
You can change the Google Search bar to another search engine, at least in Europe. You can't remove it entirely, but I just tried it and I can set it to DuckDuckGo
After about 13 years of experience with a lot of Android phones, I'm never buying anything other than Google Pixels again. Every other manufacturer just fucks up the software so badly I can't deal with it.
And no this is not an ad, I hate the state of Android atm, but it is what it is.
They fixed it in DLSS 4.