It’s not quite degoogled. MicroG makes calls home to Google. Deactivate device registration and Cloud notifications in Micro G settings if you want to stop calls home but keep Google apps. Otherwise mtalk.google.com is making queries.

I basically just used Shizuku and Canta to remove the MicroG settings. I’ll just bank on a different machine that sits at my house constantly. F google.

Also, the article leaves out that the phone has a kill switch that defaults to kill microphone and camera. I think it is configurable but I have not tried since I like the default.