And let me tell you, I almost never have to open up the playstore except for updating my banking apps, because f-droid has a much better selection of apps anyway.
For example, NewPipe is a much superior alternative to the official youtube app and it even works perfectly fine without a youtube account. I don't have to ever worry about having my google account deleted because NewPipe backs up my subscriptions to xml.
I can only recommend this approach of "degoogling" but still having the ability to fall back in case it is really needed. But so far microG has been great, they even implemented the Covid Exposure Notification framework very quickly.
OSMAnd
>no yelps, no IMDb
What do these apps provide that the mobile sites don't?
In particular, I seem to recall if you landed on Yelp, a lot of content was "here's 150 pictures, but you can only see 3 on the browser."
I use them all the time for tracking expenses, tracking information for myself, creating forms and responses, etc.
The Play store and what it gives you is incredibly hard to live without, unless you really just want to use your phone for texting, browsing, and calling. If you're a minimalist, then great. If you're accustomed to what a smartphone can do, not so great.
The alternative app stores are full of unimpressive, small scale apps. Dozens of calculators and little games, but no maps apps (of worth), no yelps, no IMDb (which I use often), no Sheets or Photos, the list is huge. I'm sorry but these apps make a smartphone worthwhile.
To avoid such a spartan experience, I ended up just installing microG (an open source replacement for Google's Play Services) and Aurora (a replacement Play store client, which allows me to install most apps from the Play store).
The problem is that most modern apps require a mammoth cloud backend, which costs big money to run, which means you're going to need a huge company running it. You'll never find big scale apps like this on F-droid.