shopping spree on a non-taxation one

You have discovered Delaware.

If you do install it, which you probably will unless you’re okay with living 10 years in the past and losing time, then you’re pretty much back to square one

Non-sandboxed play services have vastly more permissions and access to device information; it’s a step back from not having it, but utterly disengenuous to call it back to square one. It has far more privileged permission, and as you admit yourself, we don’t know what is in its code, so we don’t know what it is potentially doing with that permission.