You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policy

So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.

Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace

I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social

All distributions involve maintaining patch sets. The question is what the marginal burden of this particular patch is.

Doesn't require me to sign in or create account...

The patch set for graphene is substantial, this is a relatively minor change.