What do you mean by give Google more? The only way you give Google more is buying a pixel, but you can buy second hand. I only buy them second hand.

There are now more alternatives from EU companies if second hand still bothers you, but when I started with GrapheneOS, there weren’t many other choices.

If you mean give data to Google, graphene definitely doesn’t do that

I loved python when I was a junior dev. Now I hate it (except for things like computational math). I have to add debug statements to figure out that someone snuck in the wrong type into the code.

Graphene OS for the past year or two. Zero problems and only benefits.

You will need to get used to fiddling with security settings on some apps. For example, banking apps need reduced (meaning standard Android) levels of security. I consider this a feature so I can know which apps to find alternatives for