Wohoo!
Got there.
For anyone on their first rodeo, like me and learning their way around command line, here’s what I did, after prompts from rik and reading this thread below, with lots of helpful info from rik and chrisrg
Macos Tahoe 26.3, Pixel 8 Pro, Husky.
I followed the Lineage instructions for sideloading using adb and fastboot and was successful installing the latest Lineage build. One brain fart moment for me was when booting into recovery, the instructions state that if the LineageOS logo isn’t displayed, you’ve loaded the wrong recovery image. On booting into recovery, the Google logo always displays first, so I thought it had gone wrong, even though the Lineage logo is shown after 
.
Anyway, I reflashed the android 16 image (not sure if i needed to do this) and followed the Lineage instructions again but replaced the .zip file with the latest husky-ota.zip from here
I then got an SPL outdated error. So I went through the Lineage process but used the recovery files contained in the gitlab Iode husky-fastboot file.
Thanks for all the help, now to enjoy my spyware/bloatware free phone!