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.
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.
I am not sure if it can handle Google Wallet, but physical cards can easily be scanned and used with https://github.com/Akylas/OSS-DocumentScanner