Personally, this is so different from the way I think that I find it utterly surprising
Seven billion people on the planet. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that not everyone thinks the way that you do.
I wonder if it's an age thing. When you're young and have more time than money, tinkering with the technical hassles of your phone is worth it to save a buck or two. When you're older and have more money than time, you happily pay $399 for an iPhone if it means getting hours or days of your life to spend on other things.
Age was it, in part, for me. I used to do lots of hardware and OS tinkering. Now the last goddamn thing I want to do is troubleshoot graphical glitches in x-windows, or try to get my audio to handle changing outputs correctly, or cross my fingers while "dist-upgrade" runs, or fix scaling and font rendering in GTK apps, or whatever, when I'm just trying to do something else.
At some point I became acutely aware of every time I was doing something with a computer that was simply fucking with the computer, and not actually getting anything that I wanted or needed to get done, except to the extent that making my computer be not-broken is required for those things. Around that time I was exposed to macOS and iOS and finally had an actual choice to (mostly) not have to do that when I don't want to, and if I decide I would like to tinker then I can use... any other option on the market.
I'd probably be screwing around with trying to run NetBSD on Android phones and turn them into mobile computers I can plug monitors and keyboards into and embedding RPis and Arduinos in all kinds of crap around the house, if I were 16 again.
At the age I am now, though, you'd literally have to pay me to even think about doing any of that. Even when I screw around with getting allegedly set-it-and-forget-it RPi media projects (think: kodi, lakka) working I usually end up regretting it. I do know how to work with those sorts of things. I also very much don't want to any more, but do still want computer-things doing stuff for me with few or no hassles. Luckily these days you can pay to get that, in some categories at least. Largely from Apple, if you want them to last a while—I do wish they had actual competition in that sense. More options that don't spy (much) and Just Work (mostly), please.
Seven billion people on the planet. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that not everyone thinks the way that you do.
I wonder if it's an age thing. When you're young and have more time than money, tinkering with the technical hassles of your phone is worth it to save a buck or two. When you're older and have more money than time, you happily pay $399 for an iPhone if it means getting hours or days of your life to spend on other things.