Honestly, they are pretty damn stressed devices though.

If you think about it, they are on 24/7, with active usage at least 4-6 hours a day, exposed to god knows what humidity, unknown low and high temps, dropped every x days. It’s a modern technological miracle that they last as long as they do. Lots of read and writes with photo and video backups.

My 5 year old X died a month back (flash memory failed), I was actually impressed that it lasted that long.

Yeah, that's the problem with these things: they're wasting assets. If you want maximum longevity on your phone, not only do you need replaceable batteries but to purchase the absolute maximum storage so you can benefit from wear leveling on the flash. And even then, it will still slowly degrade over time.

Google tried to build a modular phone and ended up cancelling the project in part because these systems are essentially an SOC surrounded by support hardware. Still, I'd buy a modular phone or at least one that allowed swappable batteries because Android phones are still a beast on battery thanks to all the background services and large, power hungry screens.

Yes I'm thinking next time around to go for a good mid-range. Considering the time that phones actually last, it's too much to pay for flagship phones.

Which makes sense since they were expecting the batteries to poop out earlier