I can’t speak for Canada but at least here in the US, I’ve used every Pixel on any carrier I wanted. And most of them were small ones. Straight Talk, Ting, T-Mobile, and one more I can’t even remember the name of.
IIRC, the “allowlist” stuff was just “known carriers that use towers that are compatible with this phone.” As in, different carriers use different “bands”, or frequency ranges, for their transmissions. Your phone has to have hardware support for those bands. So the “allowlist” is really just “we know these work.” I’m pretty sure neither Samsung nor Google will stop you from using an unlocked phone bought from them with any carrier that’ll accept it. These days, I just stick a SIM (or eSIM) into my phone and just go.
I only use it for web stuff but W3Schools is usually pretty solid so I wouldn’t be mad having that as a first result.