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The lightning connector has one major flaw: the springs are in the phone side.

Over time these wear out which is why its much better to have the phone side have simple static contact surfaces and the spring loaded contacts on the cable side which is much cheaper to replace.

USB until C also did this wrong and C fixed that mistake.

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Yep, here's a picture describing the issue [1]

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-often-do-the-lightn...

I have had at least a dozen Lightning devices and I have never had the springs wear out. I’ve never even heard of this happening.

In fact, if those springs are steel and properly designed to prevent unexpected loads, they physically can’t ever wear out.

Springs will always wear out. Every connector has a number of rated insertions. Some are as low as tens of cycles only (like the 12HVPWR connector on GPUs), USB-A has 1500, USB-C 10,000 precisely because of this inversion.

For Lightning it's not known because it's a proprietary standard but it will have a number of mating cycles.

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