I am looking at haveno-reto and it has the exact same problem I had with bisq. in order to buy monero on haveno, you have to already have some monero, so you can do a security deposit. so haveno helps to reduce the number of times you have to interact with a CEX or KYC yourself, but it doesn't completely eliminate it. you may still have to do it at least once, like buying some litecoin on a CEX and changing it to some monero. I'd rather start clean with no KYC and it's very important to me.
what I am still trying to wrap my head around is, on localmonero and even localbitcoins it was possible for a person to buy coins without already having any. there were always some sellers who would let you send maybe a couple hundred bux even if you had no account history or anything, and there was never a deposit or collateral. they would still send you coins in return as long as they got the cash.
someone told me that bisq and haveno can't have this because then people will just initiate orders they have no desire to fulfill, as a form of spam attack that locks the seller's coins for a time, and that this is insurmountable without making the security deposit mandatory. but if localbitcoins and localmonero ran fine for years without this being a breaking problem, why isn't it possible on bisq and haveno? and why can't there be some other way to prevent spam like forcing the user to submit shares to a mining pool to prove that they are earnest? proof of work was invented to prevent spam.
The reason local Monero could offer services like that is because they are a centralized entity. So if you as a buyer locked the seller's coins and then refused to pay, local Monero could get into the dispute and give the seller the coins back. However, that means the seller of the coins had to trust local Monero was actually going to give them their money back if they asked to withdraw it because they were a third party custodian holding funds and therefore were also subject to government control orders. Which is exactly why they no longer exist. Haveno is more decentralized so the gov cant shut it down nearly so easily, but the trade off is both sides making a deposit. I know it's a pain, but for right now that's just the way it has to be. Other people have made suggestions on how to get your first Monero so that you can use the software.