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
For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.
For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there