I agree with you. Stock Android OSes include so much proprietary bloatware, spyware, and other garbage from OEMs and Google themselves, that its a pretty horrible experience. They don't take privacy and security seriously at all, not even good from a usability perspective either most of the time imo, as it also leads to worse performance and battery life, etc. I would much rather use iOS over like any Stock version of Android, even despite the many problems of iOS.

Only way to make Stock Android somewhat usable is through removing what you can through ADB, but even that is far from ideal and won't solve all of the issues.

Overall though, by far best option is to just use an alternate Android OS like Graphene, beats iOS or Stock Android any day. Though between iOS and Stock Android, if I had to pick, I'd easily choose iOS.