You’re not wrong. The thing that bothers me is that AOSP is being developed behind close doors and controlled by a single company which wields way too much power and control over our daily lives, and which has a track record of abusing that power.

They for sure control the direction of the development but it's not really that problematic given that things downstream projects take issue with can just be removed from the source and things they want can be added.

Agreed. Though my hope is that AOSP could be forked. Without the contributions from Google, it would surely move slower, but... well it may work.

I actually had hopes that Huawei would start that with HarmonyOS.