> I don't really see how this changes anything.
This affects much more than the small minority that you think:
PS : its hard to differentiate between ROMs here since the Android XDA community tend to be quite competitive and sharing a lot of code
- Dynamic Tiles was first introduced by CyanogenMod.
- CM introduced ambient lighting based day/night modes
- CM's Theme Engine is still one of the best out there. While they derived their themeing engine from Sony. Google added app based status tinting into android after this
- CM/PA had even introduced a camera tile which still remains a wonderous thing
- The long press on home button for google now, seems like a concept heavily derived from PA's Pie Menu.
- Runtime permissions came in Marshmallow, But CM's privacy guard came much earlier.
There are several other minor features also which made the cut from AOKP roms to AOSP.
And once you spend enough time on websites like [Google-My Activity][1] .You would realise why many would want to avoid the google ecosystem owing to their privacy concerns. Most of the alternative android app markets like F-Droid survived majorly because of custom ROMS. While their numbers were not huge, they were the few who preferred keeping control of their devices and the information that they shared. Almost 80% of the custom ROMs are forked off CM. With CM being dead,this would affect others too.
You can also thank CM for ensuring that devices have a much longer lifespan than what the OEMs deem.