Detailed and honest would be spec sheet, camera samples, couple of standardized benchmarks, basically a Kimovil.com description page.
According to GSMArena, the Zenfone 8 did not have an SD slot either. [1]
Which is too bad, if Asus offered expandable storage on the Zenfone it would be the ideal phone for me.
It is good that Apple offers mobile phones with internal storage of 1tb where Samsung ends up in 512gb but in this times of large photos and movies 2 TB should appear soon.
For some reason sd card slot is like audio jack, it's considered a thing for middle tier phones. Xiaomi have a bunch of them (various Redmis for instance), and Samsung at least used to, I haven't checked recently.
Samsung ditched both of those features in recent years.
I kind of hate sony, but in this instance they seem to be less shitty than everyone else.
Right now I'm on a Moto g100/Edgs S, which is a mid-range phone with a microSD slot and a headphone jack, but it has two camera holes in the screen, it's not waterproof and it has a single shitty down firing speaker. However, it was $270 used, so I figured I can live with this until I find something I actually like.
Oh, and both Motorola and Sony make it easy to unlock the bootloader, which is sadly not guaranteed anymore. I'm still a little salty at Google for permanently locking the bootloader in my old Pixel 2 and I sent it in for a repair.