Yea, phones should not be designed to be replaced after 2 years. Phones from 6 years ago would still be plenty powerful if they weren't crippled by Google Services eating more and more resources.

Google could use mainline kernels and force manufactures in the OHA to open source all their drivers, maybe even back PostmarketOS to prevent e-waste.

You can take an old Pentium 4 laptop and still put modern Linux on it and still use it for some tasks. Good luck trying to do that with any ARM system.