kind of, if you go through 15 different obscure menus and hope you haven't missed any, and some stuff like push notifications you can't not go through google anyway. Google also forced manufacturers to make the location toggle more obscure.

It's at least still better on Android.

On my Android phone I have no google account and I've disabled anything related to google. Yes I worry I've missed something somewhere, but on the whole, at least I can.

I was given an iOS tablet as a gift, tried setting it up and it absoltely requires setting up an account with an apple and giving them a phone number. Haven't found a workaround. So the tablet sits in a box unusable, because I'm not giving apple a phone.

Point being, the ability is still there if you want it. There's microG which is an open-source reimplementation of Google services minus the nasty parts. And even if you do use Google services, you can still sideload apps pretty easily without any Google involvement whatsoever — something that iOS lacks entirely.