I upgraded from the iPhone 6 Plus to the iPhone XS Max, on a complete whim. The biggest difference is of course, snappiness of applications. The OS, not so much, because I think Apple does a good job at maintaining iOS. But Spotify used to take 8 seconds to cold boot for me on my 6 Plus, and sub-second on the XS Max.
I would love to see hardware upgrades halt for five years while we all (collectively) get our software shit together and optimize everything for performance. That'll never happen, because I think it's in our human nature to Get Things Done in the short-term with compromises that affect the long-term.
Poor software performance is our digital world's global warming.