IIRC you can't install Newpipe without enabling side-loaded apps, though. It's not available on the Play Store for obvious reasons.

That's not a bad thing though? F-Droid has some really great apps. Very fast too compared to their data harvesting Google play alternatives.

I mostly use FOSS apps now, their quality has improved a lot in recent years.

Which apps would you specifically recommend as faster compared to their counterparts?

Geometric Weather, Newpipe ( instead of YouTube), AndOTP (instead of Google or Microsoft authenticator, the latter being 77MB!), RCX (instead of OneDrive or Dropbox etc). Gadgetbridge to interface with my Xiaomi band and Amazfit watch (also not leaking any personal data unlike the official app!)

All apps that don't do any tracking nor ads and as such save a ton of cpu speed and storage. Especially Microsoft apps are really bad lately. Like OneDrive and Outlook. I have to use them for work. After a month or two outlook uses several gigabytes of storage and gets super slow to refresh. I don't use an open source app instead of it, as I couldn't find a great one, sadly. But I use Nine from 9folders which is great and fast. Though I really want to try out FairEmail soon.

Oh and Organic maps Vs Google maps, or OsmAnd. The latter is not faster but its maps are a lot better and the app has a lot more features.

That sound like "you can't install Notepad++ without enabling something dangerous on Windows". It's a lock in hurdle that we can thankfully (for now) disable, let's not label it as a bad thing.

This is what I did and it works fine. Newpipe is awesome. On phones & tablets I always disable Chrome and Youtube.