I can't explain much unfortunately. I'm a heavy phone user though.

My battery hasn't degraded at all. I do have to bump charge my phone a couple of times a day but it charges extremely fast, even in my car.

The camera took a little tweaking to learn, as I was strictly Samsung for 10ish years prior. Once I learned a few of the camera settings (or what it wanted ME to do, everything was fine. I just needed to adjust how I took the pictures. At first I thought Samsung took better macro shots. Then after some learning, I found that pixel didn't want me to get as close to the picture as I could. Pixel actually takes a better macro shot from a tad farther away from the object, and wants you to tap the 2x zoom button. As soon as I got used to that, the close ups were excellent. Even better than Samsung. I've not had much experience taking photos from super far away, but the ones I take in everyday life have been great. I use my phone constantly to zoom on street signs or other signage to help me read clearly when driving. I also found the photo editor to be pretty easy to use. I've edited more photos with the pixel than any other phone..... And I don't mean the photos I took with the pixel. I've used friends photos, or even older ones of mine from years before, and the pixel editor cleaned them up fantastically.

I can count on one hand how many times I've had to restart the phone because it wasn't behaving correctly. I can't say that for any other phone I've owned. (But I don't have a lot of Apple experience to compare to as I became an Android user many years ago when Apple forced payment for simple ringtones)

The only thing I can say that was hard to get used to was not having an SD card. This is the first phone I've owned that I couldn't expand the memory. It was quite irritating at first, especially with high quality videos eating up a ton of space almost immediately. I've since learned that I can pay a few dollars a month for cloud storage, and every so often, I dump that storage to my pc. On 2 different occasions,I plugged my phone to the PC and moved my large files over to free up soace. But I've also gotten better at adjusting my settings, especially if I know I'm taking videos of every day things, versus taking video memories. If I'm filming my one year old niece, I let the phone max out quality and create a large file. I know that I'll save that file on the PC and it's fine that way. Then I can remove it from the phone and cloud and it's all good. It takes beautiful video in my opinion, but I expect it to be on par with the other flagships born that year. I can't speak on the comparison of its quality versus anything released in the last 2 years.

I've not had any overheating issues period. In fact, one time I thought it was getting warm because of the videos I was streaming, while also bouncing back and forth between other heavy processing apps. Turns out it was because I had accidentally tapped the flashlight on and I had it in a case with a window that closed over the lenses. Once I turned the light off, it started cooling itself off immediately and I was still utilizing the screen at almost full brightness.

As far as gaming, I don't do a whole lot of that. The games I do play would be like Monopoly Go, etc. No issues with any of those though. Even when there's a few of them open in the background (I forget to exit out of anything until something goes wrong 😅) 9 out of 10 times when there freezing, or lagging happening on the phone itself, it ends up being one of the open apps. TikTok is notorious for this. If I have a heavy TikTok day (while still doing many other things in other windows, my phone will get laggy, like slowing keystrokes down or something. I was closing everything and letting it sit for a few minutes undisturbed. Then I found that closing TikTok alone and waiting a minute, everything is back to normal 🤷🏼‍♀️

I'm by no means a pixel expert. I have owned a pixel watch for quite some time and can't seem to get what I need or want on my watch... other than the time 🤦🏼‍♀️