Once upon a time Lineage OS had Privacy Guard settings. You could feed an app fake data for things like location and contacts, leaving you with the best of both worlds: apps that "require" location will open, but you remain anonymous.
Over time, AOSP became harder and harder to build this feature back in to. AOSP (and Chromium) is Open Source in name only. One may view, download, and build the source, but maintaining modifications long-term isn't feasible without massive amounts of dev time and/or cash.
There was no intention by Google to go after forks with the changes they made that made Privacy Guard difficult to maintain, and in fact I believe it was because they added their own version of it. What could you do with Privacy Guard that you can't now with Permission Hub? I'm using Lineage right now and I have full control over all perms for all apps including network access.
Over time, AOSP became harder and harder to build this feature back in to. AOSP (and Chromium) is Open Source in name only. One may view, download, and build the source, but maintaining modifications long-term isn't feasible without massive amounts of dev time and/or cash.