I agree with the posts above, though I will add that sandboxing apps like Insular work around some apps misbehaving when rooted where things like even Magisk hi

I agree with the posts above, though I will add that sandboxing apps like Insular work around some apps misbehaving when rooted where things like even Magisk hide fall short. I would unlock the bootloader, write TWRP to recovery and go that route somehow (rsync or something? I'm envisioning maybe plugging your phones to a usb ethernet adapter here, I don't know if it's even possible to WiFi or network from TWRP though so .tar.xz?). Devices are a bit more complicated then they were just a few years ago, a cryptographic salt is stored somewhere, and the trim area (TA) plays a role, so you would run into trouble simply writing (dd) the /data partition to your second phone, but all you really need to do is keep the /data partition and /sdcard synced. Surely a script leveraging the features of TWRP seems like it should just work though? Cheers, lovely question! - threader