Wonderful to read and welcome to the team of contributors! I like to use StreetComplete when I am somewhere waiting for something and have some minutes to spare. In some regions the maps is already god enough for everyone, biggest challenge is still the quality of search results. One reason why Gmaps is so good is its search capabilities. Reporting like in Waze comes with constant running costs. OSM would need to have an income stream for these kind of features. I'd be willing to pay for it, although I don't own a car as I live in a big European city.
If you like to further improve your neighbourhood, check out https://streetcomplete.app/ Works well and is fun!
If you want to know if an app works, you can start here: https://plexus.techlore.tech/ Still a young project so contributions are welcomed!
If you don't have a Pixel like me, you can check out: https://e.foundation/ Runs since 3 years on my Fairphone 3 and gets better with every update
I use /e/OS since 2-3 years on my Fairphone 3 and never looked back. Best is to just buy a phone directly from https://murena.com/ . You support the project and can be sure that the phone is supported for a longer period of time.