You said not a high budget, and yet everyone here is saying Framework even though the they are $900 to $1,000 at the low end. To me that is not budget.

Pine64 is affordable but maybe too slow to be a daily driver, unless you feel confident finding your way through ultralightweight software and the command line and can do most of your problem solving that way.

For other pre-built options, there’s Starlabs and System76 but those are similarly priced to Librem and Framework.

Beyond that I might just research Windows laptops that are agreeable to being formatted.

If by dozens you mean 50,000?

I remember in the early days people saying that Lemmy wasn’t succeeding. Very frustrating to hear because it was like the very early days. And look at it now!