My point is that
1. If you care about privacy, you should care about security. If your email server is compromised and your emails leak in the public internet, then they are not private anymore.
2. GrapheneOS does care about both security and privacy.
> explored my phone's capabilities with root. Accessing the sensor devices, inspecting what the different apps do, what the OS is doing, installing Xprivacy to provide fake data to tracking apps... none of that is possible on GrapheneOS
I think you're talking about something like "freedom", here. GrapheneOS doesn't claim to give you the freedom to do whatever you want. In fact, part of the Android security model is to limit your freedom.
Which is not to say that you should not want the freedom to have root access on your phone. But if that's what you want, GrapheneOS is probably not it.