Personally paid for Niagara launcher as I find that to be the far superior launcher to any other I've tried. My second one is Symfonium, the most feature rich and well developed audio player.
Used to be the case for me too. But recently discovered that paid apps generally is much better polished, feature rich and ad+tracking free. That at least for me makes it more interesting paying for apps.
Checking in with my regularly scheduled F-Droid superiority post. Free, feature-rich, and no ads/trackers.
In all seriousness though, there are a lot of great FOSS apps on the stock repos and the IzzyOnDroid repos. Auxio (mp3 player) and Breezy Weather are probably my favorites at the moment.