They’re certainly losing interest in maintaining core Android, which is closer to what I meant. Everything you’ve described is within their Play Services environment.
Some of what you’ve said is incorrect as well - I have a third party gallery that works just fine on my stock Pixel 8 Pro. Its access is just managed by a separate permission.
Right - I wasn’t suggesting that it would fix the notification issue, just that it might give the previous commenter the Android environment they’re looking for.