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I think it's not really in the spirit of openness/freedom to say "you can replace Google's software, but ONLY with ours"

You could allow this in config though. I.e.

() No app spoofing () Microg apps can spoof Google apps () Any apps can spoof any apps

They could still make it default and then allow an option in settings to allow other apps.

This would be similar to how root apps originally allowed anything to use root capabilities (with user permission), and then they made the default "Apps-only".

Well, functionally that would be the same as if you just don't grant the permission to any other app than microG. Unless you don't trust that Android's permissions work properly, but then I think you have much bigger problems.

If you can put an app into /system/priv-app, you can already overwrite everything.

The only thing this patch does is provide a clean API for it, so that microG doesn't have to patch your entire system every time.

You can't install any system apps without root permissions, and at this point you can do anything, so why bother?