Yeah, it does seem counterintuitive, but they have to have some reason for it. If I were to guess it would be to keep goodwill with nerds like us. The way it stands, techies are still recommending Pixels, and that's good for them.

But whatever reason it is doesn't have to be much to have a better expected value for them. The amount of people that actually go through the process of changing the ROMs on their phone has to be so abysmally small that it is insignificant to them either way. And then the amount of people that take it the next step further and actually de-Google their phone completely is that much smaller.