How, exactly, will they "not have to care"? The identical ramifications occur with Fuscia as they happen with Linux! This is farce.

Every single problem that Android has had, from low-latency audio issues (they've rebuilt that a dozen times in a dozen cartoonish ways) to driver stagnancy, is completely and directly a result of Google choices and implementations (and they do the same thing again and again! It's remarkable). The notion that Google is going to fix all of their own self-sabotage by starting anew is comedic in a sense, and is the folly of countless foolish projects. "We keep fucking up again and again...let's start from scratch and this time we'll surely do it right!"

This time, however, it'll be different...

It is a difference whether the fault for this lies at the Google engineers or the kernel maintainers.

Google has never been required to commit upstream, but they've chosen to do so because of the ease of integrating changes downstream. They could have forked off and bashed the code into whatever form they wanted to. Breaking anything and everything.

But they didn't. They kept keeping it in sync. They probably had a reason for doing that.

Google has chosen to cherry pick commits to upstream, there is still plenty of stuff on AOSP, and much more on internal Googleplex repos.