I’m not sure why the Author makes the assertion that Apple stopped making small phones. For the iPhone 12 mini and 13 which was the premium product they just didn’t sell enough to justify the model itself while social media was clamoring for this model and Apple tried two iterations .

Also the new iPhone 15 pros are lighter than the previous models and have features that justify it such as a fully functional usbc port that while it’s only USB 3 it can function with a wide verity of dongles to get Ethernet and external media recording so you can not rely only the local amount of storage on the phone.