Take the following point of view to understand what Bukele has done in the country.
The gang members in El Salvador are nothing close to the people affiliated with gangs in the US and elsewhere. These people are serial killers, there is no way to rehabilitate and reintroduce such individuals back into society.
It is like saying hey let’s release El Chapo because his conditions in isolation are inhumane and antidemocratic or take any serial killer and rapist in the same context.
For the people that have been caught and claim to be innocent it is far from the truth. Some of these individuals were aiding these gang members in many ways maybe because of close ties to their families. Being of aid to these people makes you just as guilt, you are not innocent.
Everything you said is valid. However, I see many times people putting GrapheneOS on older pixels and while this works perfectly fine performance wise, on the security aspect is a different topic. Users that install the OS on a pixel want a robust security system that also protects your privacy. A newer pixel has the hardware and chips to support against more sophisticated attack vectors and many times vulnerabilities haven’t been identified in the wild and it takes time for people to exploit them.
So while yes it makes no sense to buy an extremely expensive phone with multiple cameras and unnecessary features, a device with the newest chips is very significant to complete your security stack on your phone.
I think the best decision people can make is to keep or move to a pixel 10 and wait for next year when new phones should have removable batteries. By this time we can also expect other Motorola phones compatible with Graphene.