From what I understand, you can still install Google services to get some of that functionality without surrendering everything. Was that not worthwhile?
Discussion
Yeah that's corrct, you can install Google Services as a sandboxed app. The difference is that its usually baked in to the OS and has full access to everything at all times, but with graphene has access to nothing unless you explicitly say so.
So technically if you really really had to youcould install Google Maps etc
Android Auto is not usable and for me, Apple photos, find my, etc is unfortunately indispensable