It may now support working on devices without Play Services, but being the same apk, Google's libraries are still inside the app. This way it's not entirely free and doesn't fit F-Droid's inclusion policy. (https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/)

Ah, I did not know that - thanks for clarifying. Does that mean that library code is still executed, or is it just "there"?

(Oh, and worth noting: it has an integrated update checker, so not being in F-Droid is less of a problem.)

I'm not sure, maybe it is worth checking the source code.

An update checker is nice though! I wish firefox had one, but at least there's FFUpdater.