I'm daily driving a Sony Xperia 10 III with SailfishOS. It works as a phone, has a small selection of native apps available and runs many Android apps using LXC based solution called Android AppSupport. It's really not bad at all.
Unless you have one of their handful of (obsolete) blessed phones and pay them money for the privilege, you can't use their stuff.
I get that they're effectively a startup spun out of Nokia, and that they'd rather sell value than give it away. Still, non-Android Linux for touchscreens is in a sad state. Having one of the only options locked up where few people can try it and nobody can contribute to it makes the ecosystem worse.
There's gotta be a better solution to raise all the boats than get a handful of enthusiasts with old Sonys to pay them $30 each.
Personally I like having Linux on the phone a lot for other reasons as well. For example, last summer I was backpacking in North America for several weeks. At some point I realized that I'd really hate to lose the photos on the memory card of my DSLR. Instead of getting another card and hiding the first one somewhere "theft-proof" in my belongings, I just went to BestBuy, got a memory card reader, plugged that into the phone, mounted the memory card filesystem and rsynced the files home over my vpn - which is exactly what I would have done if I had my laptop with me. Sure, I probably could have figured out a way to achieve something similar on Android as well, but having all the familiar tools available made it so much easier.
I preferred SailfishOS on my Jolla Phone (and my Jolla Tablet) as the experience is much better with how you can access files on the file system etc. But for various reasons (including a cracked phone screen) I went back to Android several years ago.