I agree and also avoid using their Sandboxed Play Services. Their values are security and “making sense”. Its great to have the play services and store just working but as user apps. You can isolate them in a work profile without a problem.
There is no alternative, their point is that microG is not FOSS but a hacked together version of the proprietary play services parts, it may be verrry insecure as it needs to run as system app and often doesnt get updates. And it still talks to Google and actually sends lots of data.
Their approach is very economic. They ship regular play services, framework and store, but with a compatibility layer. This saves efford a lot and avoids breakages or blocking services (Aurora) over time.
Literally everyone can run GrapheneOS, thats the point. You dont need to use the sandboxed Play, but if you need it, it works.
It annoys me too that their preinstalled apps all suck.
AOSP filemanager is needed for portals ans USB, but it sucks
that gallery??
clock is old and damn blue
sms app uses very old runtime, showing a warning
aosp contacts
They promote Vanadium and literally installing binaries from some random Github release.
F-Droid basic uses the new libraries and should be preinstalled as user app. They have reproducible builds now.
And I wont use Vanadium, as it doesnt support Firefox Addons. It may be hardened in some way but without Noscript and Ublock in my eyes no browser is really hardened if it can run every Javascript or block all, breaking 90% of websites.