prlowe Yes I'm a bit of a noob.
By installing and running GrapheneOS on a device you are necessarily placing trust in a code base that is so large and complex that if you started reading it now you probably would never finish. And you are trusting the GrapheneOS developers to have placed their trust correctly in various code from Google, Samsung, ARM, Broadcom, and companies you've never heard of.
Obviously, since vulnerabilities are discovered over time by software experts and security experts, some of that trust at any point in time will out to have been unwarranted. But that doesn't mean that deleting hunks of software chosen at random will help -- especially not just searching for "google". The vast majority of code in com.android packages is also written by Google, as are device drivers and libraries that don't even show up as packages in adb. You literally can't boot a Pixel without trusting Google's bootloader.