If you don't know by now that on iOS devices all the browsers are running the same engine under the hood, especially on a tech site like HN, then there isn't much hope for you.
For example, my Pixel 4 just fell out of Google's 3-year support period, so I no longer get security updates. I would be completely happy to run LineageOS or some other alternative that would extend the life of the phone with regular updates, but I can't if I still want to be able to use Google Pay and other apps that require the phone to pass SafetyNet. Those sorts of apps are a part of my day-to-day, so being unable to use them would be a showstopper. (I've read various things about tricking apps into believing the phone passes SafetyNet, but none of the methods seem particularly reliable, and for every user who says it works, there's another person who couldn't get it to work.)
So sure, it is technically possible for me to treat the phone as "open" and run whatever OS image on it I want, but then I become restricted in other ways as to what I can do on it. Maybe you don't care about being able to pay for things using your phone (etc.); that's fine. But I do, and I consider it a critical feature these days.
They don't have to do that though.
Instead, they can wait for the EU laws to force Apple to allow them to do what they want, with their device that they own.
Just imagine that type of reasoning applied to other parts of life, like politics, work, interpersonal relationships... "Love it, change it, or leave it" has three components, not two.
Clearly, then, there is some line that we must draw where people are buying something they think they want and yet should still get to have full access to, and I don't see why it would correlate with Apple vs. Google.
In my case, I barely wanted a phone: I want a good camera attached to a good touch screen; I have requirements past that largely dictated by size, weight, and durability. That's the device I am looking for.
The devices which satisfy my needs are mostly from Apple or Samsung, both of whom lock down their devices. (Can I install an alternative browser on a Samsung Android device? Sure. But is it my device? No. No it is not and it has never been, by far. Samsung is only ever so slightly better than Apple with respect to that shit.)
The reality is: every device should be open. It shouldn't be some trade-off in the space where you don't get to have a device with any of the other key properties you want just because it is always a better business model to build a walled garden and then shill your services, charge a usage tax, or run advertisements.
That said, in a world where it is allowed to build closed devices, and it is some random set of tradeoffs that we all have to tolerate, we have to get to complain about it, because then it is just yet another property of the device, and we get to complain about all of the shitty decisions we had to put up with, whether that's the pricing, the functionality, the quality, the experience, the "tactile feel"... or whether it is open or not.
So like, I don't really see the framework in which this one axis is something where people don't get to complain because "they should have gotten some other random shitty device that isn't at all what you wanted but was open"... this seems to just be some broken narrative--mostly pitched by people who clearly aren't also tracking the anti-trust work against Google and haven't been a part of the fight to jailbreak all of the random locked down Android devices--pitched by people who seem to just like locked down stuff and Apple's puritanical control over morality :(.
I just wish their shitty decisions didn't affect me. Unfortunately they do.