I think the issue with LineageOS (and CM before it) is that they're always playing catch-up, both in terms of porting to the latest version of Android, and in terms of supporting new hardware. Want to run Lineage on your brand-new phone? Nope. Want the latest version of Android a few months after it's released? Not gonna be LineageOS. (To be fair, most Android manufacturers take more than a few months to get the latest version of Android out to their users, assuming they do it at all.)

You can say "so what, it still works!" but I think there are weird psychological effects at play when you can make a direct comparison like "Android 37 was released 8 weeks ago but LineageOS is still on 36!" It makes Lineage feel like a second class citizen.

In contrast, if you have a phone that is designed specifically to run a custom non-Android-based OS, there's nothing to directly compare it to. Sure, you can say things like "I wish my FoobarOS phone had Google Pay like Android does", but you still inherently get the fact that they are completely different platforms and won't have app/feature parity.

I used to run CM years ago, but quit even before the LineageOS fork/transition, because I was always looking at the latest-and-greatest Android releases (even for my particular phone hardware) and feeling left behind. And it was even worse when things should have worked but didn't because of some peculiarity of CM, or things like apps refusing to run on rooted phones.

I'm really considering getting a PinePhone just to try it out. I know that I will miss Google Pay and some other things, but I'd be going into it not expecting those to be there, and expecting it to be a different platform with a different experience and different features.