You can atleast remove the googleware to a great degree, you can't do the same for iPhones easily.

Huge difference. You have fdroid, apk slicer and alternative stores without google gate-keeping. You can reflash your phone with ungoogled android or open source alternative gapps package. Use microG to sandbox google stuff.

There are ton of ways to contain googleware.

I use LineageOS without the google play (/media) services, which is the first huge step, then I also use as much from F-Droid as possible.

Google is very strong in the data heavy areas. GMail, Calendar and especially GBoard and are extremely hard to replace, as are YouTube and Translate.

Your privacy has much more to do with the apps you use than the phone itself. Apple doesn't collect user data like Google, but the difference between them is 1 company.

If you have an iPhone and you use Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Microsoft Office, Google Photos/Docs, Spotify, the Dominos Pizza app, etc etc there are half a dozen companies holding your private information either way. If you want to go total lockdown, get an iPhone with a VPN and never use any social media or cloud apps, but don't pretend like having an iPhone alone is some huge change to your privacy problems.

You can have access to the google play store and browse with firefox, use fastmail for email, use maps.me for maps, and text messaging + a million and one different messaging apps.

Then google knows what? That you installed fastmail, firefox, and maps.me?

I must say I never understood why Apple is supposed to be any guarantee of privacy?

If you are technically minded, you can easily flash LineageOS + microg on your phone a use a virtually surveillance-free phone (as far as you can, ignoring stuff like cell tower tracking and opaque baseband, etc).