Privacy enhancing towards 3rd party apps, maybe, but towards Google itself OTOH...
As someone trying to manage using an Android phone without Google's services (Play Store et al), they really castrated Android starting with version 8, when you needed the Play Store in order to reliably receive push notifications.
In fact, I'm passively looking for ways to downgrade my phone back to LineageOS 14/Android 7 because of this, but older releases of Lineage aren't easily readily available...
As someone trying to manage using an Android phone without Google's services (Play Store et al), they really castrated Android starting with version 8, when you needed the Play Store in order to reliably receive push notifications.
In fact, I'm passively looking for ways to downgrade my phone back to LineageOS 14/Android 7 because of this, but older releases of Lineage aren't easily readily available...