This reads shockingly bad, but most of that won't apply to the new devices.

Like, it will be Qualcomm, it will support unlockng, relocking, custom keys and will not have a secret debug key - otherwise there simply would be absolutely no deal with GoS.

IMO these new flagships will not be fully impacted by these issues (if at all), considering how much of the partnership initiative started* at Motorola.

It was likely them providing the GOS team with source code of some of the most critical patches, when Google withheld it for months waiting for Samsung to release patches.

Why? I guess to get the bragging rights to have the most secure android handsets in the world, to improve their own codebase (GOS pushed a lot of patches upstream and perhaps the hardware).

I'm cautiously optimistic - given how allergic the team are to the notion of the enforced compliance imposed by Google, I think it's likely these new flagships will be automatically unlocked in the same way pixels are.