Oh, that actually changes things, assuming whoever steers things these days isn't more or less the same.
No denying the guy isn't a no-joke developer, so, his code and work would be valuable, but only if the bigger picture didn't depend on his judgement.
It's not that I have a specic scenario of a particular bad thing he might do, like make a backdoor for the government or secretly collect & sell data, or even something like somehow ban you from using as an individual he didn't like because you criticized him or something. It's that once someone is shown to be that irrational, then all bets are off. You don't have to have a specific proposal of what they might do, because they might do anything.
Anyone might do anything, and the only way you can function is you just have to trust other people, and the only thing you have to go on is very little in most cases. So you have to give strangers the benefit of the doubt until there is some reason to doubt. And this guy acting this way is more than enough to avoid. It's not like there haven't been countless examples of people who seemed good at first going off the rails and taking a bunch of users down with them. It is entirely valid to see this guy and go "Nope. Avoid.", and that would not be a case of just ignorant discrimination against non-conformity, it would be using your nose for what it's for.
But if we don't actually have to trust him as much as before, that changes things.
I agree. He attacked me once out of the blue here because I said something good about CalyxOS, and said I was part of a CalyxOS-inspired conspiracy against him. For the record I've neither used CalyxOS nor GrapheneOS because I've never had a pixel phone.
I was following CalyxOS' progress at the time because they were working on enabling support for some OnePlus models but right around that moment OnePlus came out with an update that made it impossible to do change the bootloader signing keys and they abandoned the project (which I understand). I'm also a huge fan of MicroG and really prefer this open-source approach over the sandboxed google play approach. And I'm critical about some of Graphene's stances, around SafetyNet in particular ("We don't lie about security features" - I don't agree attestation is a security feature but in my opinion it's more about control/DRM). So yeah if I had a choice I probably would have gone for CalyxOS. But I'd never even heard of the guy before this happened. I had nothing to do with any hate campaign (which I doubt even exists).
But no, I don't want someone like that deciding what code goes on my phone.
Edit: apparently according to a post below he's still involved just not lead dev anymore. Sorry I missed that part.