Did I miss something, or did you not list any reasons why you do not like the phone? They have a lot of good will from customers because they like their phones...

(great screens, high refresh rate, great photos with a much lighter touch of automatic processing compared to Samsung, awesome physical switch, excellent battery life, fast charging.)

The issues are legion. First thing I noticed was the addition of bloat. The "stock android"was a main selling point for me, but I do not feel they delivered. The ultra fast charging has been nice on occasion, but I think it's done more harm than good: the battery deteriorated faster than any phone I've had before it. I've had lots of issues with the usb-c port, it keeps spitting out cables, occasionally doesn't connect properly. The behind-the-screen fingerprint reader is a really cool feature, unfortunately it's so unreliable I've stopped using it completely since it's faster to use the pin code than doing 8 scans of my finger. Lately the power button has stopped working which is super annoying, if I run out of batteries my phone is dead until an alarm rings, which turns it on again. The sound slider is a cool idea, unfortunately it interacts weirdly with several apps. The worst of which is it opens "find in page"in my web browser any time I touch it. Oh and it became loose and occasionally switches on its own, but that's wear and tear I guess... There is so much wrong with this phone...

And these were issues you had with the phone on day one?

The loose sound switch and broken power button came later, but the rest was day one.

I've had a few OnePlus phones - currently a Nord 4 - and have always found them good value for money. Early OnePluses (I think I had a 2 or 3 originally) were incredible value. Also, very fast charging and almost stock Android are lovely features.

I don't understand why you don't like them, because you haven't said!

Yeah I've also heard good things about their early devices, which was why I got this one. Maybe they used to be good? As of the 8t, they definitely weren't good anymore though

Some unsolicited life advice: don’t feel bad about getting rid of stuff that you don’t like (or in the words of Marie Kondo, doesn’t “spark joy”).

If you had sold that phone to someone else it wouldn’t be wasted. Someone else would have continued to use it.

I don’t claim to know your financial situation but it probably would have been worth the loss.

Problem isn't throwing away the old phone, it's getting a new one. I was like this with the iPhone 6. I don't really care and just need a phone that works, but separately, the 6 was the worst iPhone ever cause of batterygate.