It sounds like you go through a lot of phones. Any particular reason for that? Do you just like to upgrade to the latest, or is it due to the dissatisfaction you're referring to?
I didn't mention that my 5X flash died (after 18 months of ownership). Or at least I assume it was the flash...since the bootloader failed screen would loop.
That prompted me to buy pixel 1. My pixel 1 became non-functional because dust got in the microphone...and no replacement parts were available. So I got a moto g7 as an interim.
The pixel 3 is my wife's.
The pixel 4 is my current and replaced moto g7 because it's slow as molasses with newer android.
So basically all my replacements were because of a HW failure or SW slowdown.
This compares to my mom's iPhone 6s that still runs snappy. My brother had a 6 that worked fine until he replaced it for the SE recently.
My kids have used our ipads as skateboards across the tile and they still work fine. I drop them regularly... No problem.
My experience with Google HW is that it is sub par.
LG would fix it for free if you were lucky, they did for me. I think you had a 50/50 chance of them refusing to fix it for free by claiming the failure was due to water damage, even if that was definitely not true. The prevalence of the failure makes me think that every single 5x failed eventually. The timing of the boot-loop failure was such that your alternate Google options were probably Pixel 1 or 2 at the time.
After the 5x failure, I purchased a Pixel 2. It is very fast to this day, but the lack of a microphone jack has been a real thorn to me. My car does not support the bluetooth a2dp profile, I use the USB-C adapter to stream music, and it has put a lot of extra wear on the USB-C connector. It has lasted a long time, and everything else works fine, but it's only a matter of time before I can no longer charge it.
that being said, i do have weird issues where the phone reboots when doing video-intensive tasks (recording video, on a vid call)
for apple, iPhone is literally half their income; i think the phone business is a few percentage points for google. not a surprise that you see more attention to detail w/ apple
I'd consider another Google phone, but I just don't trust them to have designed and implemented a phone that's going to last as long as a phone of that price should last. From the latest round of phones though, motorola seems good enough, except the vibration is very hard to miss unless it's on a table; nokia has bluetooth problems with one of my cars and isn't pushing a fix worldwide, even though some countries have had the fix for months; ugh.