Free and Open Source Software

There was a good discussion in the degoogle community last week which can give much more specific details, but the short version is that GrapheneOS's main focus is security (and you get a lot of privacy stuff too), whereas CalyxOS's main focus seems to be privacy but it lacks on the security side. For instance CalyxOS uses MicroG instead of Google Play Services, which keeps you private from Google but is still a black box that you have to give privileged access, whereas GrapheneOS has nothing by default (and that can work fine for some users), but you can install real Google Play Services within a sandbox where it has no privileged access.

GrapheneOS aims to provide reasonably private and secure devices. It cannot do that once device support code like firmware, kernel and vendor code is no longer actively maintained. Even if the community was prepared to take over maintenance of the open source code and to replace the rest, firmware would present a major issue, and the community has never been active or interested enough in device support to consider attempting this. Unlike many other platforms, GrapheneOS has a much higher minimum standard than simply having devices fully functional, as they also need to provide the expected level of security. It would start to become realistic to provide substantially longer device support once GrapheneOS controls the hardware and firmware via custom hardware manufactured for it. Until then, the lifetime of devices will remain based on manufacturer support.

From https://grapheneos.org/faq#legacy-devices

Basically they don't want to support devices if they can't make them secure, which is something that requires at least some input from the manufacturer. I imagine a GrapheneOS dev would say that CalyxOS's updates to a device where the manufacturer isn't providing kernel updates isn't a worthwhile update.