I’ve never experienced this and I’ve only had budget android devices since 2018. My partner has had whatever the most expensive iPhone was every 3 years or so. Haven’t noticed a difference in performance for our uses, which aren’t particularly resource intensive, just web browsing, social media, and communication mostly. Light games like stardew valley occasionally. I think you must have gotten unlucky with a bad device.

Yeah my essential ph1 and now pixel 6a both lasted longer than either my iPhone 4 or 6. I think most devices are multi-year now, more a matter of a 5 year or more than 5 year lifespan

I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.

Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.