I believe it's also a lack of desire for custom rom. Years ago, most manufacturers rom were atrocious so you would flash custom ones but nowadays beside the few

I believe it's also a lack of desire for custom rom. Years ago, most manufacturers rom were atrocious so you would flash custom ones but nowadays beside the few Chinese one, most things are 'good enough'. Especially with Samsung one UI, what more could a custom rom bring than oneui doesn't already has? It's much more active with Chinese phone because their system looks like half ass copy of iOS, and on pixel because you can get grapheneos and others but that's all. Google didn't need to lock things up, they just needed manufacturer rom to be good enough.