Proprietary vs whitebox : worth it in 2021's datacenter ?

Trying to figure out what the best option for building a small dc is in 2021.By small I mean 80 leaves, 4 spines, 2 superspines, 2 edge spines, optics, cables, etc, 40 gb/s optics across the fabric(with some vendors assuring me 100G fabric wide is doable for a small price increase - with a catch: sourcing the optics myself from 3rd parties).

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Purpose is mainly colocation with some tenant having app specific requirements, virtualization but they mostly keep to their pods; some even bring their own networking.

Being new at this, having been through several sales meets followed by tech presentations, followed by proposed BOMs I am starting to get a general idea of where things stand - in pure theory only -.

But what about practice ?I've spoken so far to Juniper, Arista, Extreme, Cisco, Dell, Edge-Core, Huawei, fiberstore (and others, but they don't ship to my area so there's that).The big boys (except arista) try to keep you locked in their ecosystem both in software and in hardware at all costs (and the costs are substantial, and the licensing is a pain, and optics are locked and cost a fortune too).Arista doesn't really keep you, but why would you leave 😅? Eos flexibility and reduced complexity - one image fits all is very attractive, licensing doesn't seem to be a pain so it makes me pick them already as my faves but they're not cheap either. Similar story with Dell, they're pushing sonic nos and the pricing is cheaper, no licensing nonsense.

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Huawei Is much cheaper, they basically offered a bom for all of those above at around 1 mil us. optics not included. On paper they look good. Sales/Tech experience was garbage though.

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And then come the other guys. Assuring me that open nos-es, sdn controllers etc are just as good as the big proprietary alternatives if not better, and their bare metals come at a fraction of the cost (and they indeed do), run the same silicon asics for switching as some/most of the big guys do, which makes sense since most just embed broadcoms galore. How feasible is this ?

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Should I significantly up capex now and go for the big names ? licencing and being vendor locked and everything? Or should I pick some whiteboxes and go the alternate way ? It's clear to me - in theory - what the big names have to show and how much they charge.

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It's unclear to me what edgecore and other whitebox vendors have to show and how well they integrate with software. For example, some nos-es licence per box, other licence per controller, others are free and open but has anyone deployed them in the datacenter ? I am talking about things like ipi, pica8, sonic, open switch, pluribus, stratum, big switch, etc ? Has anyone deployed a fully open fabric and are they satisfied ? if not, what are the cons ?

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In an ideal cost/performance scenario, I'd buy whiteboxes that look as good in practice as they do on paper, have great open software running on them, have a great open sdn controllers available, are not locked to any licence/plan/optic whatsoever and are orders of magnitude cheaper than proprietary hardware. then get the optics and cables or straight AOCs from fs or equivalents and make it happen.