I have already noticed at least one small difference.

The way you close multiple tabs is to flick to the side of the bottom of the touchscreen. It was rather annoying that this was changed in grapheneos. But now that I know how it works, its fine.

I have yet to see the battery life and how good it is though.

I anticipate though that it will save battery life on a massive scale because it won't be doing as much dialing back to random places. the three letter agencies and google. Although it still has verizon, so there will be some minor problems there.

But its an improvement, a massive one.

The only unfortunate thing is I couldn't install grapheneos  in firefox. I  had to install chromium to do it via webusb.

All in all, good to go!

Your british?

Nope. There's a clue in there if you really want to play guessing games, but that wasn't it.

Personally I just refuse to deal with any provider that doesn't allow BYOD, and refuse to buy any device that's locked to a specific provider.
That usually means purchasing the hardware up-front at full price (or the used market, which I am a big proponent of in general), as opposed to the whole "sign up and get $phone on discount / glorified hire" thing. I'll gladly do that if it means I actually get to own my stuff. Matter of fact, everything I own I actually own, as a matter of principle.

My current phone came from England via ebay, and I did my own research on radio frequencies, carrier compatibility, lock status, parts availablilty and third-party OS support.
It was certainly more work than "sign up with $provider, get phone, use phone", but OTOH this one is mine, and I get to do whatever I want with it, for as long as I want (or at least until the next ridiculous [X]G hype-wave).

tracfone unlocking webpage:

https://www.tfwunlockpolicy.com/wps/portal/home/

AFAIK, that's just for unlocking the ability to switch to a different carrier and has nothing to do with the bootloader. I would love to be wrong, though. Maybe I should try to unlock the bootloader on my Motorola phone to see what happens.

I could be wrong, but as for pixel devices, if you don't get them from the wrong source, yes its possible.

https://www.tfwunlockpolicy.com/wps/portal/home/

sad how verizon has consumed Straight Talk, Net10, Clearway, Total, Tracfone, Simple Mobile, Safelink(obamaphone), and Walmart Family Mobile

That being the case, the Universal Android Debloater seems like my best option:

Universal Android Debloater
https://xdaforums.com/t/2022-07-03-v0-5-1-universal-android-debloater.4069209/

Universal Android Debloater Next Generation
https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation

beware the Magic Smoke!?

Nah, wrangling angry pixies and sniffing magic smoke is kinda my day-job. Nothing to "beware" of really, just keep one hand in your pocket and a fire extinguisher change of trousers believable excuse handy.

Not quite my jam, but close enough for government work. \m/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke

re: ... oh my!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lions_and_tigers_and_bears,_oh_my

and to get that earworm out, Bad Wolves tribute covering Cranberries Zombie rip Dolores O'Riordan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaS93WMRQQ

peace out

If devices couldn't agree on a current limit, they would default to 100mA (which sucked), but there was a dumber standard that pretty much everything understood...
Bridging the data pins with a <200ohm resistor indicated a device was a charger that could deliver up to 1500mA, and it saved the manufacturer on both the power-delivery IC and the two extra wires.

This is supposed to happen inside the power supply/charger rather than a generic-looking cable of course, but Chinese manufacturers aren't exactly well-known for adhering to spec... So a few "magic" cables that would make your not-entirely-compatible (or just buggy) charger and device settle on an amp or so made it into the wild, as did cables that look like a standard USB cable but aren't, because they shipped with a charger and it saved a few cents to use normal connectors but only two wires.

I've made such cables myself, they're kinda handy if you want to get an old phone charger or powerbank to "just gimme power" for not-really-usb purposes (or blow fuses on old motherboards, to be tried only if you like fiddly soldering ).

All this went away with later USB specs and fast-charging, which mandate active negotiation.

best guess is when a batch of cables Q.C.ed bad for data at a high-enough failure rate then they magically became "charging-only" cables(ooohhh, specialty item...sigh...argh)