You’re correct, I have a five or six year old kindle fire i got for like 60 bucks that I rooted and installed stock android on, it’s just a really cheap tablet now. Works perfectly for stuff like this.
My last smartphone would also have worked.
This whole thread is just a bunch of moron-consumer apologists. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate corporations and their practices, but this is just a bad purchase and buyers remorse packaged as big corpos fault.