The lack of the Google Play store isn't actually a problem on LineageOS, because you can use Aurora Store from F-Droid to download any desired apps from the Google Play store. The issue rather is that even if you get those apps indirectly from the Google Play store, many of them will refuse to run on a device that lacks Google Play Services.

This is still mind-blowing to me. The people who have an incentive to make it easy to migrate away from Google services on your devices (Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) should be working together to make an open API for app developers to use that allows swapping in different backends for basic services. Instead, projects like openpush are being developed essentially by volunteers.

if you have an old phone sitting around you could have the download apps on that and extract the apk's, then install them on your main phone. there are certain apps you can get in the fdroid store that will download apps from the play store, I can't remember the name of it.