Almost an oxymoron at this point but it's free with a Pixel phone so I had to at least try it and see how bad it is. Privacy issues aside... it's down all the damn time.
I use grapheneos and from what I can tell they are wrong. It has NFC support but google pay requires additional permissions and has not been implemented yet. I think other NFC payment apps work but I don't know much about that.
Same for me. First thing i did after buying a pixel was install GrapheneOS. However i felt like it was to locked down in the name of security so i switched to rooted lineageOS
I don't run google services but afaik there is just an extra zip called "gapps.zip" that you flash after lineage itself
My problem was a lack of freedom: i couldn't change some settings that i wanted and also i couldn't give gadget bridge the necessary permissions to function properly. I need gadget bridge for my pine time smart watch
Are you running the version of Lineage with GMS installed, perchance? Lineage doesn't bundle GMS by default which makes it somewhat painful to get things working (especially since SafetyNet is deprecated, that was the last technology I had read about a while back).
Currently im not using any google services except vanced microg i currently plan on using the proper microg to get google play working. Afaik there is a "LineageOS for MicroG" but not sure wether that's official or even up to date.