Or, unpopular opinion, if you don't care about brand and/or cutting edge camera quality, just buy a cheap Xiaomi phone.

I have been using the Poco X3 for 3.5 years with absolutely zero issues. Even the battery still holds through an entire day of regular usage.

It cost me 1/4 of the price of an iPhone and I get the same if not bigger value for my use cases (bigger in terms of battery life which was laughable back when I still used an iPhone 6, don't know if things have gotten better now).