Every pine phone distro I tried had lag without being discoverable (no spinning wheel). I don't mind waiting for things but darn it, don't make me question if the thing froze again or is just running some background task before updating the GUI.
I found postmarketOS and DanctNIX Sxmo and Phosh good enough to be bearable (it helps that I am used to slow systems thanks to being exposed to terribly slow business software at my day job).
If you solve slowness by limiting features, only very few hard core fans will buy it. If you want to solve slowness by rewriting, you need loads of cash for great programmers. If you want to solve slowness by throwing hardware at it, you need loads of money to convince big players to even talk to you, give you hardware documentation, and then write all the open drivers.
Red Hat is the closest we've got, but while they've sponsored great work at unifying the lower-levels of Linux via systemd, the desktop level is still severely lacking, not to mention the lack of a good, corporate-supported "reference" distro putting all those ideas in a coherent package. Sadly it doesn't seem to be a priority for them as they have the funding, manpower and influence to pull it off if they wanted to.
Once we get good and usable Linux on desktops for the masses, phones can catch up (and I'd argue they'd have an advantage here as they'd be able to reuse all that desktop-focused work and run Linux apps out-of-the-box).
What's holding Linux back is the lack of a coherent vision - everyone does their little thing in their own corner with their own vision and ideologies (which are sometimes contradictory), leading to a lot of wasted work and yields a subpar user experience since all those various components don't integrate 100%.
At the same time, commercial products are being downgraded in usability by nagging users to subscribe to paid add-on services, telemetry and ads. And you can't even pay to 'get back to sanity'.
How about Todd Weaver? https://www.crunchbase.com/person/todd-weaver
If there's a person that might be self-identifying with 'Steve Jobs of Linux Phones', Todd is the most likely candidate :-D