Not the same person but I’m using Nova on my pixel, for starters icon pack support is a must to me, and then Nova lets me tweak things on a granular level, so I end up with much cleaner looking launcher, no search bar, no scrolling bar, customizable background color, text color etc and that’s just a few advantages it offers.
I bought a second hand pixel 6a a couple weeks ago, my previous phone was the OnePlus 3, lasted me 5 years and at the time of purchase it was already a two years old second hand, bought them for basically the same price, 200€.