I was happy with the Galaxy S7. Got an S9. This and some other tricky-to-remove bloat like Samsung Pay is enough to have moved me from "happy with stock ROM" to "not going to buy another Samsung device for the foreseeable future".
I haven't settled on my next phone yet. Aiming at either one of the more secure and clean phones, something I can flash with Linux (like Librem 5 or some Android device that has high compatibility with PostmarketOS, might be too premature though) or a Pixel 3 with https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack.
