It gets more hate because it is actually worse. They try to exploit the phone as much as possible even more so than the American social media spyware companies. There was a security researcher redditor post somewhere I forgot what it was, but they basically went over how much more shit tik tok was able to harvest.
What’s your budget? Just got a used amd thinkpad t14s gen 1 for under $400 off of ebay. It runs BazziteOS great. Even played some light games (ultimate chicken horse) on it and it runs perfectly fine.