Yes, indeed AOSP is trivial to hard fork and maintain independently of Google, which is why so many maintained hard forks of AOSP exists... right, right? Thank for the input, world's most brilliant coder.
Yet somehow this same logic somehow becomes invalid when any open source software made by Google is brought up.
If Linux was targeted for mobile devices, there would inevitably be wasted effort reinventing the wheel just to match the feature set of Android when there’s already a suitable base to start community work from.