it seems like a great os but i am not giving google money to get away from google.
It's not only the design of the hardware, but also patches for vulnerabilities and delivering updates for several years.
You're suggesting it's ideological (which is completely untrue), while the fact is: pixels are at the very moment the only Android hardware secure enough to even care about hardening: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
(there's little sense in securing the OS if the hardware doesn't allow disconnecting the USB or there is no secure element throttling PIN attempts, right?)
if so they ought to be replaced anyways for a secure phone. please tell me graphene is not rawdogging Alphabet's compiled stuff.
if you are talking about firmware blobs then ok but still weird as the blobs are the same per soc
E: if you are talking about tpm and other stuff, eh. they are closed source anyways and i, as a user, cannot actually validate them