I tried grapheneos, and it’s great out of the box. It’s snappy, 3x manufacturer claimed battery life, and the camera sort of works (everything else did except the pixel fast charger).
However, to run third party apps (especially those that use GPS, including lyft and uber), you have to install the Google Play Services, which are sandboxed, but cut the battery life by 66% back to the manufacturer claims (so I assume at least some of the continuous surveillance crap was running / successfully phoning home).
On top of that, at any given time, 5-10% of apps would crash on startup.
They gave java stacktraces saying they got an unchecked null pointer exception when looking for random system services. The set of apps would change randomly over time, as companies only test on android, and take a while to fix such low-priority bugs.
Also, it was missing a bunch of functionality I take for granted on iPhone, and that I ended up needing (like crdt-based notes).
On the bright side, android’s non-carplay bluetooth support is miles ahead of iOS.
Tl:dr: Degoogled android would be nice, but don’t bother.
I have a Likebook e-ink android device and it's great, except for the fact that I can't trust the software at all.
I just assume it has a root kit on it.
The faster refresh isn't even what excites me about the daylight, it's the fact that it's a more trustworthy vendor (hopefully).