Graphene uses the Google codebase, so Google is choosing its long-term development strategy and standards it will support. It's like choosing Chromium to escape Chrome.

Not the worst choices!

Indeed. However, in terms of the independence, better choices exist.

If someone is making a new browser, considering you want to support the same web standards as everyone else, being independent is pretty low on the priority lists. In fact it is more of a liability since it could make for compatibility issues.

I don't understand what you're talking about. Firefox supports all reasonable standards and so does GNU/Linux.

The same can be said about the Linux codebase. Tomorrow Linus could private his branch and stop supporting public releases. If AOSP goes closed source then people can fork it and continue to maintain it.

The Linux kernel cannot be relicensed. Linus does not hold copyright to most code.

Linus is not known for decisions hostile to the users. Google is.

Linux doesn’t really rely on Linus for coding anymore…

It does on Intel, AMD and a bunch of other huge corps though

Which is not the same as one single, hostile corp.

I do agree that each company's influence in case of the kernel is much lower, than Google's relevance in Android, but there are other big-ish players in the space as well, like Samsung.

Graphene OS exists because Google lets it. You can't rely on competitors that can only exist in this manner