You are still paying 1/3 the price of a new phone a year for that privilege, which is no small sum these days. Most people I know including myself are getting like 5-6 years out of their phones now.
I should know, I did a few years of the $200ies and then got a $400 Xiaomi Note 10. Difference is absolutely beyond night and day for some uses
I had 5 years old phone and bought new one only because of battery going out and the phone screen on the verge of breaking. Yes new one is faster and have better camera. No, I would be actually fine with the same model as before.
There’s some weird status thing with people preferring to be digital masochists unnecessarily. Like people who used to loudly tell everyone they don’t have a TV, good for you?
Getting a high end phone every year when you can trivially recoup most of that cost from flipping the old one lowers the bar.
Sure you can choose to use outdated hardware for years if you want to, but a lot of people would rather not.
Also, but that is my personal pet peeve, new phones are too big for my hands. I had to buy new, it is smallest that was available and still uncomfortably big.
The smaller phones that were before were more comfortable and i could control them with one hand. So currently it is even loss that i had to buy new.
By the way the similar logic applied to my laptop and I felt much more at ease and productive after returning to Mac after three years with X1 Carbon + Arch Linux. The cost was easily worth it (the one thing I missed is a proper window manager like Xmonad but I can get by with Amethyst just fine).