Vanadium is focused on security and privacy, but not much on adblocking. For that reason I use Cromite, which is much better blocking ads while keeping good security policies.

It’s Vanadium, a fork by the people from GrapheneOS. You could say the same about Graphene, that it’s still Android, but reality is more complex.

It also comes with a hardware auditor, although you need another trusted graphene phone to use it. I don’t know about the details, but sounds very hard to mess with it.

There is absolutely no problem with that. The phone is wiped and encrypted when you flash graphene, and it does an integrity check every time it boots.

You can always buy a second hand one