Budget phone recommendations

[cpu.]

As you go higher in the series, do you get less bloat?
My wife has the Samsung A35 and I have a Huawei P30 lite and my phone still blows it out the water in terms of usability. In fact performance wise as well not sure why. Also having a earphone jack is nice. The Huawei also charges faster. Also the Samsung has this annoying fisheye lens effect on by default; from what I can see takes some work to disable it.

Be that as it may, I'm struggling to find something better than the Samsung in the SA market (with local support).

I went from the P30lite to the Oppo A78 4G.

The Xiaomi phones is not a decent experience to me, because the ones I worked/helped on was unpleasant and below Huawei.

Oppo, to me, is closest to what I had on Huawei. Just a nice big upgrade in performance and the display.