alt Hacker News> This comes up every time, I just don't understand the argument. You can fork AOSP when that happens
Hacking on the Linux stack is several orders of magnitude more practical than AOSP though. AOSP's build system is massively unwieldy for individual contributors to work on. You can't easily work on any of the system components without dedicating >100 GiB of storage for a build, for example. Everything is scattered across hundreds of repositories tied together with a bespoke repository management tool.
This all works for a company equipped with entire build infrastructure teams, not for a grassroots project trying to keep up maintenance with (at best) limited funding. It's why Nura (fka postmarketOS) is a thing whereas the various AOSP forks barely ever modify the core experience.
It's a whole operating system complete with accessibility, hardware abstraction, a bunch of core apps etc. I think it's a false equivalence that you can hack on a replacement system without similar "investmen"
In any case, were google turn malicious, it wouldn't only be in the interest of individuals to maintain a fork, plenty of companies are invested in the health of the platform that will help out.