Yes, I've never had any trouble with apps being able to get GPS location without Google Play Services. Obviously, you won't get that Google location timeline because you don't have Google Play Services or Google anything on your device. But any GPS app will work just fine.
I will warn you that apps like Uber and Lyft might not work. But that's not because of the location. It's because those apps absolutely seem to require Google Play services to even boot. Pretty much as soon as you open those apps, they will crash.
Don't wanna crash the party, but I tried the 3a and recently the 6a with Graphene, and while everything else worked really well, Location actually didn't work at all. Everytime when I wanted to get my location, I needed to wait about 5-15 minutes for it to find it. This was actually one of the reasons to not use it as a daily driver.
That's weird. Everything that needs GPS location works great for me. I agree that it does take a bit longer to lock, but it's only about 1 or 2 seconds longer.
1-2 seconds would be absolutely fine with me, even like 10 seconds would be tolerable.. Idk, that sounds really interesting, a lot of people have been saying that it appears to be a problem on my side. Maybe I'll give it a try again in some future, but now, unfurtuntately, I'm kind of locked into the Apple ecosystem again.. But thanks for that insight!
Either graphene has gotten a lot worse or something because I used to have a Pixel 3A with graphene and things worked very well. Although I have been using lineage OS on other devices a lot recently.