Probably the former. SkyECC, Encrochat, etc, were found to be deliberately sold to nontechnical drug lords for large amounts of money - as in, the project leads went out searching for drug lords and selling phones to them individually and offered to sell them 100 phones for $200 per month per phone. Drug empires have that sort of money. And they didn't sell to anyone else since nobody else has that sort of money.

It seems unlikely that GrapheneOS is the same way, since it's free, but you never know - maybe it is made for drug lords, and giving it away to the rest of us is just for plausible deniability.