It's got layers of course.
If you don't mind the way the Pixel device works out of the box, then obviously it's basically on par with an iPhone in terms of ease of use and setup. They trade blows obviously, but I'd call the experience comparable. I can switch between iPhone and Pixel with absolutely no confusion.
But if you do mind the way it works, you don't necessarily have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes, you can get the changes you want without having to do a whole lot of work. If all you want to do is sideload an APK, like the F-Droid store for example, it's some straight-forward taps. The system even guides you into it, no blatant dark patterns in my view of it. This is honestly pretty good, maybe even nicer than the modern macOS defaults!
That will get you Fennec F-Droid and uBlock Origin very easily and quickly. No developer mode. No confusing dark pattern UX. No $100/yr payments. No flashing ROMs, no rooting, nothing. Just tapping the screen a bit. Keep in mind that Android also has the intents system so many default things can be changed, not just browser or e-mail client; pretty much any action that can open a third-party app can be supported by another third-party app.
If you want to go deeper, you might root your device, install something like Xposed, or at least modify system APKs. It's not all that bad, although obviously the tradeoffs start to hit here: Safetynet no longer passes unless you bypass it somehow, OTA updates might undo some of your modifications, etc. But, it's still pretty powerful for not all that much work. Guides and tools are usually made so that moderate power users can do it. Plenty of kids do it for sure.
And finally, if you want full control over everything, you can install third-party ROMs like GrapheneOS. Honestly, sometimes this is even easier than rooting, but it does come with some downsides still (I don't believe SafetyNet would pass on most third party ROMs, although miraculously, Pixel devices do support Secure Boot with third party ROMs, which I honestly feel was a very unexpected improvement of recent years.)
Are Android phones generally less usable? I don't know. My whole family has always used Android phones and it seems fine. I do think the ecosystem of Android phones is a little weak right now, but at least we finally have CPUs that aren't so damn weak; that was one major score in favor of iPhone that was really hard to argue. They're probably still not all that close in the benchmarks, but it doesn't mater; the subjective experience is better. Android phones can finally drive high-refresh-rate displays very smoothly, and Firefox no longer feels like trying to browse the internet on a Pentium II. What I will say is that Apple has more advanced features for casual users provided that you stick to their ecosystem, but the "stick to their ecosystem" part is a hard sell for some of those features.
