The Sim only accounts for the phone number attached to the phone, possibly some of the telephone/SMS contacts (a feature rarely used since pre-android/iphone days) and if the data plan bill has been paid.

Everything else is entirely independent of the phone. Signal might lock itself from view detecting a phone number change but all the other social media won't even care.

The virtual SD card crap is in every Android phone going back 10 years now. All that commenter meant is that the pixels don't have an sd card slot.

If you go back to like, god, the year 2009 Android phones used to have only ~200MB of storage and then required an SD card to be able to save even a single camera photo. As a result when phones started to have internal storage 8gb, 16gb, 32gb that folder got attached to the internal memory and they made "sdcard-ext" for phones with both.

It's got some truth to say virtual sd card but it's idiotic to frame it the way they did. It has internal storage that's like every other Android phone for years now. The internal storage is encrypted by default. It has no sd slot. That's it.