Video game consoles are just as locked down as iPhones, but ~nobody complains about that since you can just buy a PC instead. There is no good equivalent (in terms of compatibility and privacy) to iPhone/Android, though.
Lenovo was one of the more famous abusers of its freedom [0] so sticking with popular and well known consumer brands did not save you, just as I expect it doesn’t now with Android.
You are talking about privacy from rogue app developers. I certainly laud Android (and iOS) for their approach here, and I agree that the situation is much better than on desktop operating systems.
I, on the other hand, am talking about privacy from the OS developer, i.e. from tracking that's built-in to the OS by the OS developer. The situation on Android is certainly much worse here than any other operating system.
(One could argue that the tracking is not built into the Android OS, but into Google's Play Services. Since all mainstream Android vendors ship Play Services, this is a distinction without difference.)
It is possible to make an OS which is private in both senses. De-Googled Android distributions and Flatpak/Snap prove this. So far, there has been no mainstream interest in this, though.
It's not so crazy if you understand that there are people who want to be able to have complete control over their own machines. These modern security measures trade that control for security.
But there are many circumstances where that tradeoff is undesirable. Perhaps the machine will never be connected to a network. Perhaps the owner of that machine is willing and able to take responsibility for the security. Etc.