The main difference would be that the vanilla android ui is now less responsive, the main camera is a bump in the phones back, the front camera is a hole in your screen and that the 2022 phone doesn't have a standard 3.5mm jack. The 2022 phone loses bigtime honestly.

This seems to be the main reason. Especially since the iPhone X with Face ID, the newer generations don't really have many convincing features over the previous ones. This was a lot different 10 years ago, when 3G/Retina/Touch ID/... came out with newer generations of the product.

To me, it feels like the PC market 20+ years ago compared to nowadays. When Moore's Law was still in full effect, your 4 years old PC (or Mac) was a slow piece of junk. Today, a computer from 2018 is perfectly fine for almost every task unless maybe you're a Java developer or film editor. The reason is different, the effect is similar. Let's see what others comment on this, regarding Apple Silicon :)

I transitioned from a OnePlus 5 on Android 9 to a Google Pixel 7 on Android 13.

Sure the screen is bigger and better (but not breathtaking at a reasonable brightness), photos are way better for sure, but the rest, meh.

The battery life is not impressive, the OS is kind of irritating (and all excessively... rounded?), TouchID and FaceID do not work better.

It's OK, it works, but yeah it's hard to get excited with newer models.

This ^

No company has introduced anything groundbreaking in the phone industry. However, in the 2010s many features that we have today in smartphones just weren't there.

Don’t forget the slightly reconfigured camera notch…