The general consensus amongst the Android community is that rooting is detrimental to privacy. In a sense, I agree with them since privilege escalation because of human error becomes a much bigger threat if the user has root access.

No, that's BS. It entirely depends on your "threat model" just like security.

Namely if you go full OSHW/FLOSS and yet you volunteer your data on Facebook.com (or whatever that website is called today) then you have no privacy. It's not a technical problem, it's a behavior problem.

If your threat model is about government hiring dedicated staff to know what you are up to, or that the infrastructure you rely is can't be trusted, then rooting is the last of your problems.

I'm not saying you shouldn't worry but I don't see the relevance of rooting Android in that situation. Root or not does not somehow change how your modem behaves, you're still at the mercy of the drivers.

I recommend you check projects like Precursor (at https://precursor.dev/ redirecting to the CrowdSupply page) which try to tackle, if I understood correctly, the kind of worry you have, namely actually understand the entire stack.

That being said, even in such context, you still rely on some infrastructure to relay messages to others so you need that and the recipients to also respect your privacy. If not (which would be a fair assumption) then at least you must understand the cryptographic primitives you rely on... and if you don't (which most people don't, me included despite my interest in the mathematics behind that, in particular one-way functions) then you have to some trust in the public research in the domain.

So... I do have a Precursor, tinker with it, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, had an iOS phone until recently, switched to (rooted) /e/OS and my personal position is that while interacting with others (and a mobile is 100% about that) one has to make pragmatic about their choices.