You should consider actually trying it, before you confidently write it off. F-Droid is amazing and the single-greatest force keeping me off the official Google Play and YouTube apps. I don't suffer through ad-enabled PDF readers or subscription-service native apps; it's all just free software, and it beats the pants off every other mobile software store I've ever used. It is actually that good.

Isn't this just an android distro though? So just supporting the Google side.

I think it’s just alternate app distribution on existing devices.

I get it that you have to choose one or the other, and it does make sense since f-droid has a bunch of open-source apps available already.

They just need to work on the hardware and operating system now

I mean... there are open source apps on the iOS app store too. I have several for example: https://kodare.net/apps.html