Even on grapheneos you got to install the play store and play services to get most app to work, which mean connecting to a Google account.

Technically you can use fdroid, Aurora store, or only use stock applications but if we are serious, not all domestic abuse victims are also geeks that know how to do all these things.

They will need their apps, for instance for social security. Also, many people use their phone to pay nowadays, can't do on grapheneos.

Domestic abuse is a serious threat and people are motivated to stay away from their abusers, but if you give them something so barebone that they can't do 90% of their stuff, a significant percentage of them will revert to their old behavior and risk compromising themselves. For instance, buying a second phone and connecting it to the old Google account just to browse tiktok.

They don't need completely bare-bones setup. Sweet spot for non-geeks is installing play services, which can be used without signing into an account and by default have invasive permissions revoked. Then installing playstore apps from aurora store.

Play store is not a significant privacy risk. It is a huge improvement being sandboxed, not installed by default, not given permissions by default.

Grapheneos has 99.99% app compatibility and over 90% of banking apps are compatible.