If it's got a sim card, it's still phoning home and providing location data. You can't escape the panopticon. A faraday bag gets you mostly there, though, but the point isn't that you can maneuver against it, it's that the device and its operation is fundamentally compromised by design.

There's a whole lot of shady crap underlying the infrastructure and the hardware that consumers cannot touch, pinephone / librephone or otherwise. It's not designed for consent. At best you can gain ephemeral relief, but even that is illusory, because by simple process of elimination, differential analysis allows fine grained ID and tracking of people even if they don't have accounts, phones, interact with websites, etc.

It's not a shady cabal of lizard people, it's just the grubby natural alignment of interests by a wide ranging set of companies and regulators and groups who allow it to happen without imposing any accountability, and ensuring that the system remains structured such that no effective accountability can be imposed.

Extorting constant streams of data for adtech is too valuable and the entire thing is too complex for silly things like ethics to interfere.