A) China's intelligence laws greatly suggest those blobs are going to have backdoors, particularly for the modem
B) Even if they weren't using backdoors, there's nothing stopping the US from unilaterally banning all Chinese made devices (something I definitely don't put past them since the TPLink incident)
It's already not guaranteed that the US govt won't outright ban the use of GrapheneOS, so adding the extra risk of Chinese manufactured phones getting the kibosh stateside makes me not want to risk $1600 on a phone.
A) This is already the case for basically every phone for sale, and thus isn't really applicable to this article. Also, I thought the modem was by Qualcomm?
B) Sure, they could ban all Chinese made devices but that would basically mean banning all devices. Pixels are made in China just like Motorola, so again, not much of a difference here (I'll allow that there may be a difference of just how much of the phones are made in China.)
C) How is the government going to ban the use of an open source OS? And why would they? Apple has spit in the government's eye a few times and yet they don't ban iOS.