Thanks for the update, great to hear that everything worked out
That reminded me about OEM unlocking.
E.g. in this post there is some information about it:
@ff2u gives there a link to the Fairphone forum where there is a detailed explanation at the end.
It seems that leaving OEM unlocking enabled leaves the possibility for recovery e.g. when the system won’t boot.
The Pixel 5 is treated as stable in /e/OS but I think I’ll wait at least until a successful OTA update before blocking myself from a clean install from scratch.