Yes that is ironic. As someone else said, Google made the best de-Google-able phone. But from what I gather they chose it because of the specific hardware features and they need to restrict what they support to keep the project manageable and maintainable.

I bought mine outright and wiped the Pixel version of Android and am pretty happy. To be clear, I wasn't trying to avoid giving Google money ... I just wanted a phone and operating system that I felt like I had control of, without having a ton of bloatware and spyware pre-installed by the vendor etc.