It's pretty trivial to get your own almost-GOS with root. The official GOS release simply doesn't support it in the production images.

Why not root has been explained many times and you actually either want the official image with no root exactly because of the benefits, or you want custom image because you don't need these benefits.

For location faking Mock location works on GOS,l.

I see much bigger problem with not having a reliable backup than not having root.