The drama around one of the devs does not affect the quality of the project. It also has nothing to do with US Big Tech. GrapheneOS is free and open source software. That being said, not all FOSS is made equal and you should avoid projects that don’t take security seriously.

To be fair, those apps were plagued with poor security practices to begin with. Switch to GrapheneOS and get your apps via Obtainium. Check out privsec.dev for why you shouldn’t use F-droid. Open source apps are great but some have really bad security practices unfortunately.