The amount of individual power you gain by having (by 30 years ago standards) a supercomputer in the palm of your hand is far more liberating than any corporate espionage can take away.

What can I say? I disagree.

If you understood the amount of data phones hand off by default, before even installing apps, perhaps you would change your mind. Did you read the terms of service and privacy policy? I wouldn't fault you if you pressed "yes" even if you didn't. Most people don't.

All the info is available if you start looking. The horrors of digital life is such that I cannot describe it. You must understand it for yourself.

If it ever does get bad enough to the point that the average person is losing more than they gain w smart phones, we already waited too long to have the revolution.

Solid agree. That's why I'm not advocating saving the world or saving society as we know it. I advocate saving yourselves and your decedents.

You cant spend your life living in a cave out of fear that one day the communists will send us back to the stone age

I wouldn't mind an off-grid life innawoods. But that's still a bit drastic to me. That's why I spent years learning about this stuff. Knowledge didn't make me paranoid, it scared me shitless for good reasons.

Here's a few basic steps on how you stop Google from listening in, while retaining the basic smart capabilities of an android-style phone:

1. Get a smartphone that has an unlocked bootloader.
2. Install a custom recovery partition such as TWRP.
3. Flash a custom ROM (Operating system), I recommend LineageOS. CRdroid is nice too.
4. Set up your own cloud server to replace as many smart functions as possible. Nextcloud is a good all-rounder. Consider using variants of ARM processors (RISC-V systems could be good to go by now) to avoid having a remotely operated co-processor on your server, like all modern computers have.
5. You should also replace your router's firmware, OpenWRT or Tomato works nice and have both VPN clients and servers.

And then you start hardening your system.

I'm not saying "Don't use modern systems". I'm saying that if your attitude is that you know it's bad and refuse to do anything to reduce the harm, you should consider not using it altogether.

Unfortunately I'm also saying that the technical skills to use a smartphone/standard computer with reasonable privacy is unreasonably high.

Even for a "reasonably decent techie" like me it's too much, I'd rather just go without a lot of these modern spy-machines.

Fun fact since you compared a modern phone to 30+ yrs. old super-computers, a modern smartphone (2020) is roughly 5000 times more powerful than CRAY-2 (1985). Consider the possibility that I know more about this topic than you and if so, what sort of horrors have I seen to be so strongly against it?