LegalPusher I understand where you're coming from, and we did consider these niche use cases. I will pass your feedback on to the rest of the team for the further discussion, however this is already something that is over for the majority of our supported devices. With 5a almost out of the way, it only leaves the 6th gen devices.
Doing this would not only help GrapheneOS be able to make builds faster and reducing the size that people have to download, but will also bring security benefits to people on these devices.
While it's unfortunate that these apps are now charging for something that was once free, using apps that are not receiving updates is an issue, aside from them being 32-bit, which is another issue in and of itself.
Even if we don't make this change, you would have needed to migrate from those apps to using something else when you eventually moved away from your 6th gen device. I understand that's not nearly as soon as this change would be, but still.