This, unfortunately, has been a thing for over a decade. I was excited to discover that Samsung Galaxy S3 (i9300) is/was one of the better-supported phones for custom ROMs… until I realized that the one I have is a Sprint / Virgin Mobile version (d2spr), which looks the same but uses a different SoC entirely.
You might end up needing postmortemOS
On a serious note, you can run without a battery
What’s your usage pattern for those devices? Almost full discharge + fast charge?
Asking because I only noticed a very small degradation (judging by reported charge %) in a flagship device after 3 years. A midrange phone from 2020 with heavy usage (charged twice a day sometimes, often using a fast charger) for 2-3 years did not have noticeable battery degradation. A low-end device from 2016 had no noticeable degradation after 4-5 years. Another 5+ years old second-hand phone had some, but nothing catastrophic. The only case of bad battery degradation (shutdown at 20%, unreliable gauge, etc) I have only seen in 10+ year old devices.