[MaKey]

I've been using my Samsung Galaxy S21 for two years now and don't notice any performance degradation. I feel that the bloatware you're speaking of is also minimal. It has far more features than an iPhone, e. g. Samsung DeX, which is actually quite interesting. The photo gallery app is good, I think you'd like its story feature. It has object recognition and creates small stories from pics of people, pets and certain days on which you took a few more pictures. I also like their new AI photo editor (Galaxy Enhance X). It gave me good results on overexposed pictures without me having to manually fumble around. The regular photo editor with its object eraser also comes in handy. If possible I suggest you try one of the new Samsung Galaxy S devices.

[vetinari]

More than decade ago, in 2011, my father had Galaxy S2 and I had Galaxy Nexus. Hardware-wise, they were comparable (Galaxy Nexus was something like Galaxy S2.1), but the former run TouchWiz and the latter vanilla Android. The latter was much more snappy, the former's performance did degrade.

Now fast-forward almost a decode. I'm using Galaxy S10 since its introduction in 2019. TouchWiz is nowhere to be found. Samsung uses OneUI nowadays, which is actually pretty cool, and I prefer it to vanilla Android. Basically, I have as good experience with it, as you described.