I've had a Pixel 5a and currently have a Pixel 7. Have enjoyed them greatly. The 5a was a bit mediocre overall, camera performance wasn't that great & it got a bit slow over time. That being said, the clean OS experience and integration was always nice and it was perfectly suitable for my needs at a good price.
Now that I'm using my Pixel 7 as a daily, the Pixel 5a is holding up pretty well with GrapheneOS as a backup phone / media player.
Pixel 7 has been really nice to me. Interface is smooth, camera is nice, everything just works essentially. And getting the latest Android pretty quickly is a nice feeling. My only gripe is that Google's SoC is still a bit lacking and battery life isn't the best, but I hear the current Android beta has some promising battery life improvements.
Overall I've been having a good time with them. Still kinda miss my Nexus 5x tho, that thing was sweet...
Discord cant stream desktop audio at all on Linux aside from sharing a tab's audio if you're using Discord in a web browser. There are custom clients (like discord-screenaudio which OP mentioned) capable of doing this to some extent but they're based on the web version of discord and lack features / can be buggy. Also these options don't have hardware encoding so any fast moving content will become a choppy mess for the viewers.
The other alternative on Linux is to just route the app's audio into your mic source. Others will hear it but it will come out as if its your mic so even those not watching the stream will have to hear the stream audio unless they mute you.