You're hallucinating a narrative about me based on your stereotypes. I think we all can identify people with Stockholm syndrome love, arising from their past technology abusers.

You could be generically correct. However I never bought a Nokia and I haven't used one much. I am not a Nokia apologist.

I lived through the period, and I'm commenting on what I saw at the time. Sometimes there are fans of a product or brand for good reasons.

Perhaps one of Nokia's major skills was familiarity between their models - especially for keeping the same menu structure and keyboard shortcuts. Familiarity is a powerful force. Oh, and they reliably worked - a definite plus!

I did own mobiles from other manufacturers and I have the scars from dealing with their (edit) painful UIs (Sony, Kyocera*, Motorola, Dell). A keypad and small screen (or worse a one-line numeric display) create some difficult constraints.

Cordless and Voip phones proudly continued the tradition of crappy handset UIs well into the age of iPhone.

* I loved my Kyocera Palm Pilot phone - there was even a LISP App that you could program a simple UI in -magic! Although my first love was an Atari Portfolio DOS handheld (not a phone): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio