>What else should they have done?

Use an AOSP fork like grapheneos or lineageos. Barring that, voting with their wallets and buying a HarmonyOS phone. If for whatever reason they're doing that too, there's probably more powerful forces behind this change (eg. government mandates) that won't be helped by spamming an issue tracker.

Downside is those specific forks only work on very specific devices, when there's countless great hardware in the wild with shit software.