Sounds like she's in denial. Does she also change the subject when losing an argument?

Anyways, I think you have better chances addressing her denialism than to argue any other political point. As long as someone won't argue in good faith, all other arguements and debates become pointless diversions.

EOS does indeed have google services removed, and replaced with microG, which is an open source replacement that allows dependent apps to still work. You can check it out here:
https://e.foundation/e-os/

I really like the balance they go for between practicality and privacy. Never tried their own online services so I can't comment on that part.

As for VPN with hotspot, no idea. :D For what it's worth, regular hotspotting worked fine in my experience.

If you're concerned about the lifespan of the device, maybe the FP4 or FP5 would better. Lacking headphone jack aside, they seem like good upgrades and should last waaay longer.

Sorry for the late reply. I think they promised "5+ years" of support for the FP3, so that could theoretically already end in August this year.
However, like with the FP2, they have a great track record for long support and only ever seem to want to push that support even farther. Also I'm using the EOS ROM on this phone which is based on LineageOS. The combination of a very open phone and an open source OS leads me to expect I'll still be using this phone for another 5 years easily.

I've been using Fairphone 3 with /e/os manually installed for about two years. Here's my experience:

Stability wise there's been two issues. Once after a big version upgrade, the GPS stopped working. It turned out the mozilla location service was somehow disabled. Switching it back on fixed that.
The other issue is that I've noticed lately it's opted to not play my ringtone for sms and calls. I'm not sure if that's a bug or some odd default behavior in Android 12.
Also I should mention how the Google Play apps in the App Lounge can be a bit random in when they are available to be installed. I'm not sure if that's a stability/bug issue or just Google Play being uncooperative. Overall, I'd say stability has been pretty good. I don't remember last time I had a crash. There's been maybe 1 or 2 crashes in total.

As for the cloud based apps and IOS styled launcher. I'm not a fan either, but just using alternative apps and switching to Neo Launcher has been great.

Overall I've been really happy with the phone. It's offered almost exactly the balance I want between out-of-the-box android compatibility/ease-of-use vs degoogled privacy & customizibility.