I got my 7a referbished for 350. the nothing phone is cool IMO but probably not going to have good support rn for nieche stuff. lineage & divest not having working versions for the phone raises red flags personaly.
if you are anti pixel & $500 is in your price range maybe take a look at the fairphone 4?
self hosting is the only way to guarantee logs arent shared.
however it also means that your server address only pulls requests for things YOU look at, not the whole pool of people using the server. imo this is a bad trade off as it would allow the services to track my browsing easily anyway.
personally I would recommend looking at libredirect with a large # of frontend instances selcted & a vpn/tor. these websites normally work without javascript, so assuming you have a privacy focused browser your IP is the only tracking metric they really have. spreading your requests out over different servers whilst using a proxy would make this really difficult to correlate as it would require that mutliple instance operators were malicious & collaborating.