Carmakazi

To answer your question directly: No idea.

Of tangential importance to your question: Apparently TPB has been considered untrustworthy for a number of years, probably since it “returned” after the original crew behind it did a stint in Swedish prison. Infected torrents have been found there and the “skull” ratings mean very little.

Aren’t read-write disks fairly unstable from a longevity perspective?

Google is still the one that provides the hardware/security updates to my knowledge. They could choose to cut that off based on the “legitimacy” of your OS or other arbitrary reasoning. It wouldn’t brick the phone but it would lose all future support, making GOS much less compelling.

It seems to be a concern to the people behind GOS, enough that they are looking for an OEM to make phones to their specs, but I haven’t heard anything to the effect of “Google will stop all support or brick devices that aren’t verified.” Maybe existing GOS Pixels will be fine, maybe they’re sandbagging, I don’t know. It’ll definitely suck for me with a Pixel 9 Pro XL that I expected to keep into the 2030s if that happens.

The humble sawzall: