It is a really unfortunate position that Google put open source Android builds in.
But your approach is sensible.
Technically the updates are proprietary until released, which many people will not like. So keeping it opt-in makes sense.
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(made a deletion request on last note for a bad typo)
Patches always had a timed embargo for years, patches still come in a quarterly not monthly schedule. However, this embargo was stretched likely to get OEMs in on releasing patches on time (spoilers: they don't).
We got partner access from a major Android OEM who can provide these patches before their release, since we can just distribute this ourselves, it can be useful to people who want the patches. They're proprietary to the user but not us, we have access to sources and fix conflicts before distributing.
We openly encourage people to compare the update packages and reverse engineer it to figure out changes and make their own open source patches. People should encourage them to stop the embargo and patch faster.