Yea you’re not wrong. Kinda fed up with most smartphone manufacturers these days. Its all so restrictive. And to your point that Google is one of the only manufacturers that allows the bootloader to be relocked, thats for now. No telling what will happen in the future which is another part of my issue.
At one point i was considering making a small pc out of a raspberry pi or something to replace my phone just cause i dont like the way phone manufacturing in general is going lol.
Kinda silly but i still think about it.
I dont use Graphene OS but my understanding was that it allows the user to sandbox Google play apps: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
So this gives Google play less access than it normally would. I think thats probably the biggest draw of it other than security updates for longer periods of time for older hardware i imagine.
Again, I’m not a user of it so i cant say for sure but I’ve beem interested in trying it out as it seems up my alley as I’m getting more pivacy conscious as the years go by.
I’m def a windows hater but i dont fault people for using it. Most folks arent gonna know how to install a diffrent os or even want to if what they have already works.
Use what you like and what works.