Re: your last paragraph -

Think of it this way. Google pulls in 300 billion USD a year and 80% of that is advertising revenue, not leaving a whole lot of the pie for Pixel phones once you take out subscriptions, Chromebooks, GCP, etc etc.

Sure, they're probably making some money on every pixel sale but the point of them making mobile phones is to support their advertising business.

I'm not a Graphene user, but that's the way I see it. At the end of the day if you get the phone secondhand you're not giving them any money at all.