Generally, please note that you are reading an announcement news article about a new product and not a technical article about the pros and cons of certain Android OSes. A "standard Android" in this context is AOSP, which all Androids derive from. GrapheneOS has a stronger focus on low-level security features (e.g., hardened malloc), thus this wording here was used. There is no intention to talk bad about any other Android here - just our subjective reasoning why we chose GrapheneOS. Concerning the apps, this reflects our recommended apps we have documented and we never labeled F-Droid as scam, contrary to this we even recommend using f-droid.