I feel you. Phones move so fast, they require a lot of compromises from the user. I am currently using a Pixel 7a, 8mm longer and 3mm wider than the 4a, and I'm reasonably happy with it. Although to be honest, I also have my pet peeve with it - the build is not as nice as my previous Samsung Galaxy S9, and I miss that. You could also consider 8a, same size as 7a, and support will last even longer, so if you get accustomed to that, there will be no need to change for a while.
The most recent 3 generations of Pixels have 7 years of support from launch. One of the hardware requirements for GrapheneOS is 5-7 years of firmware and driver security patches. We continued allowing 5 years to avoid locking ourselves into Pixels since it's the hardest requirement from https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices for major OEMs to fulfill. Most of the rest are done for them by Qualcomm with a flagship Snapdragon SoC.
The numbers on that site aren't quite right. For the Pixel 8a, May 14th, 2031 is 2036 days from now which is ~5.58 years rather than 5 years. They're using the 1st of the month instead of the launch day and for some reason the number of months is also sometimes dropped. In practice, a Pixel being launched in May will mean it's going to get a final update in May and the first missed update will be June rather than May. That means their end dates are 1 month early in practice. Not clear why the number of months gets dropped for some of the values they show such as the Pixel 8a.
