Comment by grapheneos

Providing root access to a huge portion of the OS with a way for apps to obtain it goes against the privacy and security focus. It's never a reasonable way to implement the features provided by those kinds of apps. It's an insecure shortcut being taken to implement features poorly and insecurely without proper integration. Providing root access to end users is a much different thing than giving it to a huge portion of the OS with a way for apps to request it.

We wouldn't mind providing a 2nd set of releases with user root access but those would have separate signing keys for privacy and security reasons. It would not be accessible to large portions of the OS to apps. We don't do it because it would double the number of builds and would be a massive amount of additional work for managing and testing it. It would take immense resources to create a variant of the OS which we'd recommend against almost anyone using mainly to provide a novelty. We have much better uses for our resources. Resources are always limited and doubling the number of OS releases for a 2nd time would have a huge cost.