I already abandoned the 950. Not because it doesn't work for this purpose, but because I bought a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, which gives me the best of both worlds. The Xperia XZ1 is very similar to the 950 in hardware build quality. I like that it has USB-C and, best of all, a camera button. I cannot express how happy that makes me. The camera is very good, too. I am not a camera snob, so it is good enough for me. And to top it off, the Xperia XZ1 Compact is actually smaller than the 950 and has much better battery life. When I connect it to the charger at night, it still has up to 70% charge. I would get at least 2 days on a charge, which I never got with my 950. I have to live without wireless charging, but that's fine since the battery lasts so long. I had to flash the firmware to get the fingerprint reader to work. If an update breaks it, I think I can live without it (I'll just have to get rid of more apps).
I still have my phone in a semi-minimalist configuration. My essentials are phone, SMS, email, Audible, podcast, basic music app, Google Maps, photos, grocery (OutofMilk), and weather (Yahoo). I have no games, no social media, no news apps, no AI assistants, etc. I still have some apps that I hardly ever use, but I keep just in case, e.g., banking app, google pay, uber, open table, password keeper, etc. I use Nova Launcher and hide the apps I cannot uninstall. I have a grand total of 28 apps in my app drawer.
I am also trying to minimize my use of cloud services. I have a NAS (qnap 251A) at home, so I use the Qfile app to automatically upload my photos and videos to my NAS and the Qphoto app to view them. I don't use any music streaming services. I still use outlook mail and use google for search, but there are some things that are too difficult to take out of the cloud. I'm sure Google is still collecting a lot of data about me. I'm not ready to turn off all location services just yet, and there's no guarantee they won't track that data anyway. I still use YouTube also.