Oh, there are many acceptable phones, as people use Linux phones and this community also exists. There are many Linux phone users out there that accept a phone and choose to use it.
No need to use a Pinephone, we have more modern SoC that are well supported, such as SM6350, SDM845, SDM670, SC7280...
EDIT: Also, what I forgot to mention is that you really don't need to sell 10 million phones to build usable and decent hardware. See for example Fairphone, they have sold less than a million.