It truly baffles me how teachers could morally justify that. I would immediately think “Wait, if I make my students buy my textbook for the unit, I’m just fleecing them and they have no choice in the matter.” and you would naively hope that anyone else would also feel the same way.
Its pedantic and distracts from the real conversation happening. I’ve always considered “stock” to mean how the device ships from the factory (that’s how the term is used in the automobile world), whereas I would think it fair to consider AOSP a standard, it’s something you can compare other ROMs against.
Regardless of mine or anyone else’s opinion, we’re just ultimately wanting to talk about how GrapheneOS is much closer to the clean and uncluttered experience AOSP offers