Yea, the whole thing has always given me a lot of pause when I comes to GOS. I'm sure it's still an awesome solution, but makes me think twice. In the end I have literally zero need or desire for anything Google running on my phone so I'm on calyx.
Been remodeling a house that we just bought and this has been a my experience as well. I just enjoy making things. Software, home automations, wood, anything. The joy of building. I think that's what it is.
Everything is declared, from packages to configuration, and then I can put it in a git repo locked to versions. If something breaks on updates, you have free rollbacks. Which means you can't screw up too much. Also it has almost all the software.
While that's true, all the things they built are individual and open source, it wouldn't take too much work for sometime who knows how to package things up for a phone app. That said, you'd need another device to do all the processing.
I'll be honest, I've used scribus some and have not liked it. I hope that this makes it better. I much prefer a local Foss program to being forced to run a VM for publisher or make stuff in canva.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say power does corrupt. For almost all of history, any sort of power eventually comes with corruption. Its kinda the human condition. That being said, I do think there are ways of minimizing that corruption and defending against it.
Emacs can do that obviously. And everything else.