Sure yep brainwashed. Still not running third party firmwares compiled by pseudonymous folks somewhere in the world, and still not running sideloaded modified APKs or sideloaded much of anything.

Hell, I'm not even running the assorted very functional "photo scan to pdf" apps that I purchased Pro versions of over the years because while there are some very skilled developers in Moscow and St Petersburg I have no way of checking on whose behalf they use those skills.

Revanced is just an app with no special permission. It's not a firmware. It's open source. It can only patch an apk which you provide to it with standard android file-picker APIs.

I understand exactly what it's doing, and while it's better than doing it on an active system in still going to stay away.

From a security standpoint, can you tell me what's different about this vs "I ran this chunk of PowerShell that said it would patch Office to bypass activation"? After all, it's just a patch.

The patch is totally open source, and the project is rather high profile. Where exactly is the additional risk here?

From a security standpoint, What's the difference between using revanced's open source patches and downloading literally any open source software from GitHub?