I have a few thoughts about this thread:
Firstly, I have to agree with @anon82677111 here. When considering whether to change something, you have to think about what that would achieve. It’s hard to think that if you’re worried about the stock OS on your Android device “spying” on you, simply replacing the launcher will fix or even improve the situation. It will only introduce another party into the mix. The OEM has a lot of other things installed on your device in most cases, including things you can’t remove, so the effects of replacing the launcher are dubious.
Furthermore (and this is not your fault; if anything, it’s a failing on our part), I’m not sure if we’re comfortable with having threads that are essentially a list of projects recommended to our readers. We take a lot of time to craft our recommendations and guides and a lot of research goes into them. While there may be nothing necessarily wrong with the projects you’ve mentioned, I’d be wary about opening up the forum for people to list off projects they’ve come across, as that might lead to people stumbling upon and downloading something that may end up being harmful.
The same goes for third-party lists and guides, such as the sites you’ve mentioned. While there may be nothing wrong with them, it’s best for us to be very careful about whether we want those mentioned here, as we cannot ensure their quality (and even if we could verify their quality today, we cannot guarantee that the quality won’t drop in the future).
It is our job as moderators to ensure that the members of our community are getting accurate and safe advice.
I am not removing the thread at this point, but we will revisit this when we have a clearer idea of how we want to handle these types of threads going forward.