iOS must not even exist anymore because it’s closed source. I can feel my iPhone disintegrating before my eyes.
Look-but-don’t-touch source, except for how there are multiple successful alternative builds like /e/os, LineageOS, and GrapheneOS
The second largest country in the whole world gets by using Android without Google Play services even being available there, with Android commanding a 77 percent marketshare.
Sure, I fully agree that Google isn’t super enthusiastic about open source for Android beyond the ways in which it benefits them, but there’s a lot of hyperbole in your comment.
the point is that you're not going to be able to upstream any changes
Android is unhealthy versus its former self in that it has been increasingly hostile to developers. Your examples of /e/os and lineage are representative of the "look-but-dont-touch" nature of Android.
Not to diminish the hard work of the developers of them, as they are useful, but they do not stray far from what Google provides them for better and worse. As you say, they're alternative builds, primarily to reduce the ties to Google, but they largely adhere to the same APIs, have the same menus, have the same quirks. Perhaps graphene goes above and beyond, I have not used it. I remember Cyanogenmod having more divergence in feature set and appearance from what Google provided versus what Lineage can do for you now. I miss when Android was good, but it's just become the platform I don't want to upgrade and see what I lose next.
Now changes in toolkits made it so that e.g. copying text from apps sometimes doesn't work. Google Android has a work around by using OCR (?) in the overview to select text. I feel like the former change is directly related to the ability of the OS to copy text anyway. This might not be a deliberate choice to limit AOSP but it shows how they design with proprietary Android in mind. Thus AOSP gets less useful as an OS as the design is not well thought out.