Your last paragraph hits really close to home. Nomad Century by Gaia Vince might be worth reading to you.

Will they though? Facebook has already created undisclosed bot accounts themselves before. A Platform where real users and such bots are indistinguishable (for the user) sounds like a social media corpos and authoritarian governments wet dream to me. Also reminds me of the attempts to disguise ads as natural content.

The GrapheneOS team is very aware of their dependence on google. They are planning to either find an OEM for their own line of hardware or a brand whose phones support their requirements other than google. That being said, it will complicate work a lot, but for now it would be to early to jump to that conclusion.

Also, Google couldn’t care less if <1% of buyers flash a custom ROM / OS on their phone, this is about tying the android ecosystem closer to google in general. Most other big phone manufacturers know this and are trying to come up with their own solution, like Huawei had to because of the ban when the orange man has been president the first time.