I am advocating for an official build for the Pixel 8a and the rest of the Pixel 9 series (beyond only the Pixel 9 which just was acquired by the dev team to create builds for). I did find that typically we only provide official builds for devices that the team has physical units of for hardware testing and support. But for series devices like this I think it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to extend to the other models, maybe with an asterisk or something. This would then allow them to be able to re-lock the bootloader, be on the central OTA update server, etc.
I guess “stay tuned” on that front.
As @petefoth mentions, I do create (most of) the unofficial builds for Pixel devices. @ronnz98 did build a lot more of them before, but as I was already building older Pixel builds, I started building the newer device builds as well, as ronnz has a full plate with multiple ROMs and multiple device vendors that he makes builds for. Note that I hope to get OTA updates working for the unofficial builds hosted at the lineage4microG project site (essentially @petefoth and my builds) in the next month or 2, but giving the ability to re-lock the bootloaders is a bit beyond me at present.
+1 this is how I build, I can pass the script I use but it is nothing more than the sample script you can see if you look up the instructions. It essentially just sets the build directories and populates the necessary parameters for the docker image to run.