In most apps, there's several settings you can change to try and fix that. If you ever want to try it again, try using qksms (or another good alternative at the time), and playing with the settings.
I had the exact same issue with signal on my last phone.
Ugh, stuff like this is why I bought a pixel. I got an s23 for "free" from T-Mobile, and it was so infested with spyware and bloat that even android debloater couldn't get it all.
GrapheneOS has basically made it all worthwhile. I do with I could have multiple (more than 2) profiles though.
Iirc you can just install a VPN app in the work profile to accomplish this.
Many do, or at least did a few years ago.
You can use android deblaoter or ADB to disable many of those packages, but not all of them. Be warned, that you can easily cause instability this way.
If there's a custom ROM without gapps and touchwiz or sense or whatever they call it these days, that would be a much preferable solution. Unfortunately, Samsung is determined to be difficult about custom roms, so very few are available on their devices.
When you have the means, I recommend a pixel with graphene or a Linux phone, depending on how serious you are.
Usually, yes.
Xiaomi isn't a thing here, but pixels are usually <$500 USD and get like 5 years of updates, plus I don't think graphene runs on anything else.
Probably by scraping. Scraping is what you implement an API to avoid, its basically the client masquerading as a web browser and then extracting the data it wants from whatever the website sends out.
It's bad for services because iy involves sending much more data and filling more requests. It's bad for the developer of the client because scraping is more complex and breaks whenever they revise the website layout or anything like that.
But if you're going to pull a twitter, you get what you deserve.
I'm a Linux user, so I keep steam (and by extension, proton and my steam games) sandboxes via flatpak. While I'm sure many anti cheat solutions can install rootkits (or ARE rootkits), I doubt it's profitable for them to design that particular type of malware.
Unfortunately, no, you don't. However, you can buy computers with Linux preinstalled. I haven't looked in a long time, but they were only marginally more expensive when I looked last.
Also, installing Linux isn't difficult at all, provided that your motherboard isnt weird about booting it (really just luck of the draw, but usually not a problem), and that you're willing to nuke all your files. Dual boot installations are where things get precarious.