my budget for a phone is about $150. i have been thinking about getting a pinephone (with a keyboard) but that would have been twice my budget, and after i saw a friend with that having trouble getting the keyboard working, i passed on it. before i had a fairphone 3, which i had received as a gift, but its performance was worse than the $150 phone i had before that. now however i got a very good deal (slightly over my budget) on a refurbished 3 year old oneplus nord that new would have cost $400. and boy, i have never had a phone that was that good. not only is it much faster, the battery lasts longer too.
i can now understand why people like to spend money on a high end phone. i still won't spend that much but thanks to refurbishing services i don't need to.
i really appreciate what fairphone and pinephone are doing. we need these alternative phones. i had my share of them, firefox phone, geeksphone. a sailfish based phone from india, a samsung phone running tizen. i even got a second hand openmoko very cheap because the owner was unsatisfied with it. and i can really see the evolution.
the problem is that these phones are a few years behind the curve and that the apps are written for high end phones. (the fairphone was really struggling to run wechat)
so actually, in theory you should be right. there should be software that is snapping fast even on these phones. i mean even the openmoko had usable apps. but in practice, sadly the hardware is simply a limitation.
perhaps in a few years phones will reach the same state that desktop and laptop computers have now. they can only speed up by adding more cores, and individual applications can't really go any faster, so a 7 year old computer still performs fine, even for my kids as a gaming device.