Same with Graphene, there’s no way around that if you want the phone to work. But I can’t agree with Lineage being better. They’re user debug ROMs, the dev’s are never willing to call a release stable, don’t even remotely have the hardening that Graphene does, and walking around with an unlocked bootloader is a huge security threat both from a physical and remote exploit that would attack the boot partition/space. Add to that you don’t have verified boot working, so you’d never even know it’s happened, or attempted.

Then there’s the microG problem of apps that need the play store verification to work, banking apps that won’t work, even apps that don’t do license checks and simply need to prove they’ve been paid for will be dead most of the time. Plus, Lineage out of the box is still contacting Google, yes, you can undo that, but how many are aware of that and actually finish de-googling it? If I was stuck with a phone that wasn’t a Pixel I (may) use it, but given a bunch of apps I want to work wouldn’t, would probably just sell the phone and get one that’d run Graphene. If you take user bias out of hit and logically compare them, saying Lineage is better than Graphene is basically impossible to do. You can run Graphene and have a phone that in most cases runs 100% normally, most apps that removed about modified phones are perfectly happy running on it and the user gains the security and privacy upgrades, without the downsides. Clearly they still need to make smart app choices, but they also don’t have a phone that isn’t a constant pain in the ass.