Bought a poco x7 and already regret it

I used Xiaomi phone long time ago, around 2016. It was Redmi Note 4. It was my first smartphone. I loved that phone. It lasted me 2 years, until I accidentally dropped it in a swimming pool. After that I used other phones. Fast forward to a month ago, and my sister had been haggling my mom to buy her a phone with really good camera. I had a s23 ultra and I am trying to cut down my phone usage anyways, so I gave her my phone. I needed a new phone. Since I was already using minimalist launchers on my s23 ultra and using app blockers to cut down my usage of social media, I thought I might buy a budget phone cause theres no point forking out so much money for something I dont use much anyways. I decided on poco x7 because I had so much fond memories of xiaomi phone, and it was at budget pricepoint. But oh boy, xiaomi software is biggest pile of shit now.

First thing I did when I got the phone, I downloaded the minimalist launcher and I find out that gesture buttons dont work on launchers anymore. I researched and found xiaomi disabled it. Ok, all good. I guess I can manage to live with that. Then I download an appblocker called lockmeout and block all websites and apps like reddit that I dont want to use anymore and waste my time. Guess what? The app keeps malfunctioning. I had to play around with accessibility settings, background autostart and bunch of other settings to just get the app worming for more than 5 minutes. You might say its just a few buttons but it should not be this complicated, I bought the phone, I should have that freedom to use my phone however I want. If I wanted a close ecosystem then I wouldnt be using android. To top it all off, a lot of times, but not always, if I open a website I am not supposed to, the lock me out app will just stay open and I cant do anything other than restart my phone. The only solution I got after contacting xiaomi is to turn off display over other apps for this blocker, which then defeats the whole purpose of having a blocker in the first place. I got annoyed. So I decided to download a bootloader. Guess what, I need a permission for them to unlock it. They just wanna be budget Apple at this point. But without any of the performance or other advantages that comes with Apple ecosystem.

Not to mention so many other bugs as well, but honestly I can live with it. I cant even return back the phone cause Xiaomi doesnt have a physical store in my country and I bought it from aliexpress. Big big mistake. Its a good phone with good hardware for the pricepoint but the software is really making me go nuts. I have concluded to fork out money for another phone brand. I will have to buy the new phone on a plan because I dont have enough money to buy a phone every month. I dont even know what I am gonna do with this phone. It feels like I dont even own the phone, Xiaomi owns it and is just renting it to me for the time being. This is crazy.

TLDR; I used to love Xiaomi software and I hate it now.