Yeah, you second phone sounds like a laptop. I have a boring phone that I don't care about with basically factory settings and perhaps 3 apps. MyGov, Dropbox and something else I can't even remember right now.

And I also carry a super cool small laptop that can tether to the phone and actually do stuff with.

One is an appliance, the other is a computer.

I was going to say that. I carry a laptop and an iphone 13 mini. The iphone is nice in a locked down way and the laptop you can code on etc. I'm not sure I see the attraction of the non locked down phone compared to the laptop for most use cases. I guess I could location spoof pokemon go so there'd be that.

I sometimes bring a bt keyboard to use my phone as a tiny almost-laptop, but mostly happy with something just the size and weight of a phone.

Used to have two phones ~10 years ago. A Jolla Phone was my primary phone with a sim card and ran most non-Google apps. Then I carried around a cheap Motorola Android phone that had no sim card but could run Google Play apps and when it needed wifi I shared that from the Jolla and otherwise it was fully offline and most of the time turned off.

So the phone that was closer to a small laptop was the one I actually used as a phone. Not sure if that is the setup I would go for again or if I would do it the other way around with the Google phone being the phone. If I do the latter I guess something like a very small Linux netbook would work as a second device, it such a thing exists.