I take it you mean easily unlockable bootloader, not really out-of-the-box root access which no phone have.

I have taken the opposite stance on that. Never again will they be left with some Samsung bloatware which hardly receives any Android updates when phones such as Nexus, Nokia and Nothing costs the same and has excellent LineageOS support.

Lineage is stable, bloat-free self-updating and requires no maintenance from my side.