What made you choose crdroid over stock lineageOS?
When the google photos became a paid service crdroid was giving an option to do unlimited upload of photos by spoofing the device as pixel. It started like that and it gives more customization compared to lineageOS, so I stuck to it. I used both lineage and crdroid, there is no notable performance difference.
BTW, I’m not longer using Google photos for backup, I setup a homesever and use immich as my backup solution.
One thing to note, it will become very difficult to unlock the bootloader once the device is updated to HyperOS. There is no way to unlock it if you have purchased the china version.