You still need to address this part: "Qubes is great but at the end of the day cannot protect against evil maid attacks to the level that pixel or apple phones can. Its great at making sure a browser exploit cannot steal your banking credentials you have open in a different virtual machine but cannot overcome the limitations of the platforms it builds off of."

That's the crux of it you blow past every single time it comes up, and then disparage others as having not stuck around long enough to educate you (as if that's their responsibility).

Adding: Qubes is really no better, and maybe worse in some ways, than having a discrete banking VM in your bare metal Xen hypervisor. Sure, there are some improvements such as handing input devices over to an appVM, those sorts of things one could do in Xen manually, but broadly speaking the value Qubes bring is it does an amazing job of making living out of a Type-1 hypervisor barely doable for some small subset of people. And the "barely" and "small" is increasingly shrinking with each major release.

The magic of Qubes isn't its isolation, it doesn't even provide its own isolation. Qubes is an integration layer added on top of an isolation foundation. So you have a clipboard, file transfers, window dressing, easy configuration of device pass-through rules, all that. It's great.

It's phenomenal at that. But you have to understand what it is. You have to layer on a whole bunch of additional cruft to the Type-1 hypervisor, potentially all of which introduces potential vulnerabilities to dom0 and/or relevant appVMs. (Fortunately the project moves very slowly even for its size, which gives me some reasonable degree of confidence in its third-party code contributions, if less than I have in GrapheneOS's team's contributions.)

GrapheneOS solves a lot of these practical issues in very real and excellent ways, and it does it in large part via its tight integration with the excellent hardware it runs on, "Google" notwithstanding. (Now, "Motorola." "Lenovo." "China." A poor architecture even when made in America is not a practical improvement.)

Qubes-by-way-of-Xen does it despite running on pretty horrendous architecture. Even with your labor-intensive and super geeky improvements you've made to your setup, an evil maid attack, a theft, coercion, legal and political forces, all of these factors hit a harder target in GrapheneOS than they do in any QubesOS configuration currently achievable. But, as stated, trying to contain the most dangerous software most people ever run, a web browser, from leaking into your password manager? It's great. If that's your primary threat model, it's difficult to beat. Profiles on GrapheneOS are also excellent for that, if less well-integrated and therefore usable as Qubes.

Qubes still wins in terms of virtualization, of course, and you're comparing the benefits of virtualization to all of the many other benefits GrapheneOS brings (and in many instances iOS too), but you're not comparing them meaningfully.

Type-1 style virtualization is on the GrapheneOS roadmap, and once they achieve that it will be vastly more secure than QubesOS running on any x86 concoction you can devise. Give me a ThinkPad that meets GrapheneOS's hardware requirements running a virtualization-based GrapheneOS implementation and I would have little reason to ever run Qubes OS again. That would be some kind of peak practical end-user security solution, and I'd imagine enterprise and state customers would flock to that, if the broader enterprise requirements of it all were met, too.