>I don't care about google pay/wallet

and if you did you could use curve pay instead. Basically the same thing with more features, the only catch is that they charge FX fees after surpassing a limit (but that can be mitigated by paying with the same currency of your linked card, thus never executing a change in the first place)

FWIW I've tested Android Auto before with sandboxed Google Play, works fine.

Yup! You can even get Android Auto to work without Google Play:

- https://github.com/sn-00-x/aa4mg

Once upon a time I would be happy to put custom ROMs on my phone and do all these patches.

These days I just care so much about "things should just work" that I cannot justify doing this. I cannot think about how I could spend time figuring out what to do when the repo is no longer maintained or something breaks for random reasons.

Agreed. Sandboxed Google play really is the non-tinkerer's approach on GOS, including for Android Auto.

The value I get from either being degoogled or using GOS like I have for the last year and a half is worth the 3-5 hours time investment once a year or two when I get a new phone.

This is a fantastic find, thank you very much! I ended up switching from Lineage + MicroG to GOS for the android Auto support because I couldn't find something like this. I will be setting this up on my secondary Lineage device.

Must be a recent development. Kudos to the GOS team for improving compatibility!