That is fair. Hardware vendors Google chooses for their flagship devices and their endless blob requirements are the problem, not AOSP.
They become hard to separate as I don't know of any current gen devices with IOMMU/secure boot that can run blob free.
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The proprietary code in userspace can be inspected/audited (it even has symbols), fuzzed and hardened with a subset of the techniques used elsewhere. This is about ideology, not so much privacy or security, especially when the far more complex SoC underneath is closed either way.
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That code is not obfuscated and has debug symbols. You get all the function names, etc. even though you don't get the source code. It's not a black box. In reality it's not really any harder to inspect it for backdoors than any of the open source code. People don't do either.
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People want to, but few but you have the life setup to do it full time.
If I do manage to hit escape velocity one of the first things I would do is double down on helping people like you and supporting open hardware targets.
Until then it is deciding what is most tolerable.
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The Librem 5 and Pinephone are not open hardware targets though. Librem 5 is even closed in ways that the Pixel hardware is not. Pinephone at least doesn't do destructive things making things substantially worse to play stupid semantic games to get a meaningless certification.
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The librem laptops/desktops ship coreboot/heads firmware, neutered ME, and run with no OS blobs.. Give me that in a 5 inch form factor even without a cdllular modem and we are getting closer... But no such luck yet.
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So, still entirely closed hardware / firmware, just with some bits of the firmware supposedly disabled. Pure security theater incomplete form of verified boot / attestation that's there for marketing instead of as a meaningful or usable implementation (it's neither).
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Not sure why you care so much about proprietary components for device support in the OS that are not obfuscated and have full symbols available. It doesn't matter if the code is open or closed source beyond barrier to entry in working on it and people don't work on either anyway.
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I care about those blobs because they represent a massive amount of attack surface that, as you admit, no one has time to reimplement and/or audit.
At least Google reviews the code they write, but it is obvious they don't review blobs either given vendor quality.
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Google and other vendors are given the source code for these components and get to build them from source. The reason these things don't get attention is because they are specific to a hardware generation and no one cares to invest much time in something that becomes obsolete.
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It doesn't particularly matter whether this code is open or closed source. Either way, people are not working on it much. Most effort goes into the device independent code. AOSP doesn't have blobs. Devices have blobs, whether or not you run AOSP using those or something else.
Mostly I guess I express frustration in the daunting volume of blobs in current gen devices. Google creates so so much work for the community with their vendor release approach.
Keeping up with them properly would be multiple full time jobs.
I overall take your points though.
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Far less of those things are actually blobs than it appears. It's largely Google creating this problem by simply releasing the vendor image for Pixels rather than putting support for it in AOSP. You don't need to include any of the components in the system image. Just omit them.
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Qualcomm has invested effort into the open source driver stack but it's never ready in time for it to be what vendors choose to ship. Look at linaro.org/blog/dragonboa as an example. This is the same SoC as the Pixel 3. It has open drivers for mainline kernels. It comes too late.
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That is the first credible evidence I have seen that there are people at Qualcomm that care about these classes of problems.
This is going to end with someone trying to get VC funding to pay for an actually open driver hardware target isn't it...
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