It's one of the most interesting new phones (at least for me). Moderate pricing, long support, good hardware. And probably many options like LineageOS or Graphene if you want a custom operating system.
There's a ton of advantages, but some very real disadvantages as well. No lsposed and incompatibility with certain magisk modules are probably the biggest for me personally.
Using a device with no vendor-provided firmware security patches doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Also, the Pixel 8a gets 7 years of updates. That's plenty of time, and most people get a new phone after a much shorter time.
Calyx is pretty insecure by default, it removes some default AOSP security features and is very slow to push security patches. And it doesn't include any of the GrapheneOS security features like hardened SELinux, a hardened kernel, secure app spawning, hardened Chromium browser and WebView or hardware-based integrity attestation. It also uses a very flawed Google Play services implementation (microG) which requires root and has worse app compatibility.
LineageOS kinda dead these last years they only do pixel phones. While the hoards of people using android are buying Samsung's and Xioami's budget phones
Edit: after reading the comments. I checked again and was surprised they have updated the list with newer models they weren't on the list a few months ago
How so? The devices page on the wiki lists 171 officially supported devices. I'm writing this comment on a Poco F3 running the official LineageOS 21 release...