> There's absolutely no reason to use /e/ when GrapheneOS exists.
There absolutely is. If I was choosing again today I would be tempted to switch back, for the reasons I listed. And I would probably miss many things you cited, like Storage and Contact Scopes.
As for MicroG, afaik I can't use it on GOS without considerable effort (recompiling OS) and probably also ongoing maintenance burden (updates). So this is not an option for me, FP5 with /e/OS is still better then.
NetGuard - very nice answer, shows exactly what you and GOS developers are missing! Yes, the actively hostile apps will exfiltrate data as soon as you let them contact anything on the outside. But most of the apps are by incompetent/lazy/pressured devs who just throw in some library and don't even care that it leaks data to Google. For example my banking app. Why the hell should Google be notified when I decide to open my banking app? If I cut its network, as you suggested, the app stops working. But if I just blacklist Google site for this app, the problem is solved. Of course, I don't want to cut it for all apps, because then some might not work. And that's just one of many similar examples.
That's why I said that the main focus of GOS is security, not privacy. If they cared about privacy primarily, they would actively support microG and NetGuard, or at least similar solutions.
That said, I am actually a fan of GrapheneOS, it is just so frustrating that we can't have it all in one package. Ah well.