A great step that will solve most of the junk problems that I see, is to move to a custom rom.

For non-techy people I think the best way of getting into it is surely the mass surveillance, “you use social medias, but did you know that all of it is recorded and reported on these?” I would try to use some scary things that would make people first really interested to it from the start, instead of proposing alternatives the second you talk to them. Examples are countless try to inform yourself on the Edward Snowden leak to explain it to them, talk about the numerous spying techniques used by big tech. Hope was at least a bit useful :)

Give me questions that you ask yourself I will be very happy to answer them ;)

It’s not about going “full privacy-hardened” than to not use at all any phones with stock Apple and Google software. Seriously you can do any effort you want, the first one would be to install a custom android privacy based ROM. You can’t go around it.

Great job, keep your motivation!

But you shouldn’t use any apple product, they are as bad for privacy as using Google’s one. Do not use an iPhone (lineageos is pretty good to use), do not use Apple’s services… And keep going