Ah, I forgot about the warning. Are the blown fuses you're talking about related to to your unlocking though? Or did they just remove the debug functions. I guess it reduces the attack surface somewhat.

I do agree it's far from ideal though. But there are so many, much worse offenders that uses these fuses to actually remove features, and others that do not allow installing a different OS at all. The limited effort should probably be spent on getting rid of those first.

I'm not sure I'd agree with your last conclusion, we as consumers can choose what to buy, so for me the situation where there's one brand that produces open devices (with competing specs, not like pinephone..) where I could install postmarketos/ubuntu touch without any parts of android would be better than there being many brands producing smartphones allowing only basic unlocking and without open firmware.

Of course there are bigger problems in the ecosystem, like Play Integrity which actively attempt to punish me for buying open hardware. Unfortunately that's the consequence of putting "trusted" applications where they IMO don't belong - there are smartcards with e-ink displays and these could be used for things like banking confirmations, providing the same security but without invading my personal computing devices. But thanks to Android and iOS, banks/governments went for the anti-user option.