Google has actually taken great strides to make custom ROMs as easy as humanly possible

I guess that is besides:

• slowly, but surely, stopping development of many AOSP core apps in favour of their own proprietary apps.
• ensuring many of their apps are basically unusable with a custom ROM
• making it so easy for app devs to block custom ROMs

Dunno, but that’s all Google stuff.

I hope so. I really want Valve to allow Android games on to their store and allow installation from it etc. I’d trust Valve way more than Google, thus I’d be way more inclined to buy Android games.

I don’t have an answer for your specific question (you can easily find out testing such a scenario on docker on your personal computer), but you should look into bazzite and use either brew or if you feel adventurous enough use package layering to add fish to the image.

I hope one day there will be a good Google Wallet alternative. I’ve got a Pixel phone with GrapheneOS, and Google Wallet does not work because Google doesn’t trust it. It would be great to get something in it’s place.

If Apple really care Asahi wouldn’t be reversed engineered, and instead would be implementing from docs.

No. Apple cares as much about FOSS as they care about privacy. They only care when it suits them.

I don’t think I fully understand how this is supposed to work. Am I correct in that this service acts as the gateway on the network? So clients would be configured to see this as the gateway, and this then subsequently pushes things through the real gateway (router)? Thus essentially everything (most things?) that the router does would be done by this instead?