GrapheneOS wasn’t going to be affected anyway and there’s nothing for the GrapheneOS developers to change. The developer verification thing will be done by proprietary Google apps. Those apps cannot get the necessary permissions to block app installs or disable apps.
GrapheneOS won’t be affected. The developer verification thing will be handled by another app and won’t be part of the OS. That app won’t have permission to block app installs or anything like that.
GrapheneOS isn’t dying. There’s an OEM partnership in the works and they’ll release devices with support for GrapheneOS in a year or two. GrapheneOS still provides updates and while the changes have made some things harder, the project is still going strong.
GrapheneOS will be fine without F-Droid.
I may be misunderstanding, but which push? The open source project was started in 2014 and was named GrapheneOS sometime in 2019. You may be seeing more about GrapheneOS because of the Motorola partnership, CalyxOS dying/being on hiatus (so many of their users switched to GrapheneOS), and recent news pushing people to use more private OSes.