And anyway, Android, even the free software part, will always do what Google wants to do. One may fork Android, but maintaining an ever diverging fork would have an ever growing cost.
And there are aspects of newer Android versions that are less than ideal. For instance, one can see how Termux is struggling to keep working: it is not possible to run binaries that are not part of an Android package (APK) anymore. This is a security feature, but it's not always relevant depending on how you use and manage your OS.
Plus, developing for Android is a pain. You need to download, setup and use a bloated SDK with a non-free license. There's Android Rebuilds [1], but it's not complete.
I trust GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, Manjaro to evolve in a direction I like. postmarketOS probably too, but I'm not familiar with it as well.