I looked into my options really carefully when choosing my phone last year. Few things to note, when looking for an Android phone:

• Make sure it’s either a pixel or a Snapdragon powered phone. This just means that if the manufacturer does some stupid stuff, there is a higher probability of your phone having a custom rom.
• Stay away from Samsung if you want to install custom roms, they are really against it.
• Pick a manufacturer of good build quality and software updates being stable, some manufacturers just half as them and brick the phone/ damage display/motherboard because they pushed update with wrong voltage.
• if you want a basic phone and don’t really care about the most beautiful photos or do heavy mobile gaming, just pick a cheap phone, it will be more than enough.

The phone I picked was Moto G52, it cost me ~150USD and it is one of the best phone experiences I’ve had. It lasts me 2-3 days on a charge, mostly because I do close to nothing on it just answering calling/messages and some basic internet surfing. For my purpose, it is better than a top end iPhone/Android phone.

Motorola is quite slow with updates, but the community is great and created and are now maintaing custom roms, which means I get the latest software updates quite regularly. The camera is passable, but the speakers they are loud like really really loud, louder almost all smartphone.

Bonus points: it has a headphone jack.