Pixel 5 is cheap. It really depends on your use case. I like the 7 for the cost point and size.

As for storage, there's not really an easy comparison as they do things differently. I hammer on phones, move a lot of files around all the time, take music and movies with me, and find 128gb is fine. But I also use Media Monkey as an iTunes-like media sync (you can use iTunes, I just don't like it). I also use Syncthing and Resilio to access my own media.

Edit: Also Android handles storage a little differently, by having dedicated partitions for things like system and user. For example, my "128 GB" phone actually has 117 GB usable space due to formatting, native apps/user config data and such (apps and config data are stored in the user partition). The space used for the operating system is a different partition, inaccessible to us users so not worth worrying about.