Maintaining one's data as private requires that it is protected as a baseline. Privacy violations do not solely exist as telemetry or data offered up by the platform to some other party.
The protection is achieved through security. The major goal of something like GrapheneOS is privacy, which needs solid security as a prerequisite.
The blobs, while proprietary, are not opaque. They are able to be examined and they are.
The security of a device should not be dependent on what you choose to run on it. You should trust and be able to verify that the platform on which you are running the software prevents something malicious from accessing data which doesn't belong to it or otherwise violates the rules set by the platform (OS).
In this respect, the Librem 5 would do a horrible job compared to even stock AOSP. Thinking that you are secure because you only run "trusted" software on an insecure platform is cope.
This is a personal anecdote and you are making up an absurd conclusion. No one said things would collapse. Security can be evaluated objectively, and the better the security, leads to fewer instances of exploitation. I'm certain the actual data around InfoSec would support that idea.
You have the ability to do what you want on your device. Root access in AOSP is just used as a hacky shortcut to achieving specific functionality. To do it properly while maintaining the security model would be to build it into the OS itself. The same concept applies to desktop platforms and the Librem 5. This isn't related to freedom.
That device, and the Debian derivative it runs, are not private or secure.
That absolutely is not the point of the project and completely misses out on the many general privacy improvements that GrapheneOS makes, as well as the huge privacy improvement offered by running Play Services in the untrusted and unprivileged user-app sandbox.
The protection is achieved through security. The major goal of something like GrapheneOS is privacy, which needs solid security as a prerequisite.
The blobs, while proprietary, are not opaque. They are able to be examined and they are.
The security of a device should not be dependent on what you choose to run on it. You should trust and be able to verify that the platform on which you are running the software prevents something malicious from accessing data which doesn't belong to it or otherwise violates the rules set by the platform (OS).
In this respect, the Librem 5 would do a horrible job compared to even stock AOSP. Thinking that you are secure because you only run "trusted" software on an insecure platform is cope.