My phone is from 2019 and already lacks removable battery (but this doesn’t matter in reality) and IR blaster. I regularly look for possible replacement phones and only see, that there is no advancement anymore, except for having more CPU power and maybe a little bit better cameras.

Instead phones are - bigger, though still no more pixels, which means less DPI), - thicker, resulting from more battery power, which I would not need to use if they would integrate better power saving CPU/GPUs – also I don’t play on the phone, - therefore much heavier, - lack headphone jack - lack SD card slot (but the built-in storage is sufficient enough) - are increasingly more bloated with software than cannot be deactivated or removes phone features if done so

And all phones are the same with the same disadvantages. There’s no variaty like e.g. on the car market.