I see it as a necessity, because the Google phone is the only one worth it if you care about security.

The problem is not GrapheneOS, but rather that phone manufacturers other than Google don't care. Now if there were millions of GrapheneOS users, it would start becoming interesting for other phone manufacturers to care.

My point being that I buy Pixel in order to give more weight to GrapheneOS, in the hope that other manufacturers will eventually realise that.