I had recently installed Grapheneos on my pixel, with a goal is determining what was responsible for all the senseless Google domains that a pixel normally contacts.
To my surprise disabling Network for the Google Services Framework and Play Services killed all of the nonsense. The only downside was that GSF has the push mechanism in it also, that many apps use for push notifications.
If only there were an alternate for push notifications that all apps would use.
Anyway, Grapheneos runs way cooler than Google's Malware version.
I get all my push notifications, apps etc without any actual Google services on my phone. Remote google servers are still used, but in a more (though not fully) anonymous manner.
I'm not really the one to ask as I don't buy a smart phone for a camera. However, it looks good to me and I have a picky eye. And from what I've seen, you can use Google Camera on Grapheneos and get the same quality pictures and video.
I was very disappointed with the (default) Camera after switching to Graphene, luckily you can just download the Pixel Camera (including all the Pixel optimizations) from Play Store on Graphene OS or download it as an APK bundle from some other sites (downloading the normal APK won't work, it has to be the bundle).