Well it could just be part of the collective corporate alliance that will always do anything they can to make any kind of freedom cost more for everyone. GrapheneOS is taking your freedom and not feeding on the corporate-issued fodder, and well, they don’t like that. So this is just one more small difficulty added to that choice.

This kind of thing is only the beginning. It won’t be long before absolutely nothing will work on any freedom-oriented OS, software, hardware etc.

Some fires need to start, and soon.

Yeah I really wish they’d make it less ironic. I mean, to NEED google hardware is just a cosmic practical joke.

I’m not sure about Graphene specifically, but as long as there’s an established procedure documented, I’ve done like fifty installs of custom Recovery and various ROMs, such as Lineage, crDroid, Resurrection, Havoc, Cyanogen, AOSP, AOKP, ASPCA [:-)], WKRP [:-)], etc. and dozens of other less well-known ones, and I have not bricked one yet. So, as long as you don’t do anything blatantly foolish, should be ok.