We could do anecdotes all day. Unless there is hard data on how brittle or robust these devices are it all seems a bit pointless.
One of my pet peeves is engineers making excuses for incompetence.
Data shows 100% reliability then?
Or do we just do that for brands we're not fanboys of like __true__ engineers?
They're not good data, they're some of the worst. Your idiosyncratic one-off experience should be addressed, but not necessarily generalized from. I feel like this is an important, perhaps even the most fundamental prerequisite for information literacy.
An anecdote is "I forgot to pray before bed last night and now I have a headache. See God is punishing me." and other people agreeing with this happening to them.
Saying, "here is a documented pixel bug that was released on day x but wasn't fixed until day y" is evidence and data.
Once its documented as a real bug then its no longer in the land of weird anecdotes.
How you categorize that is up to you. You can be dismissive of what that bug broke as an "unimportant feature" but its no longer an anecdote.
you can pretend it doesn't matter, but bad word of mouth is all it takes for me.
Battery started discharging rapidly, I got it replaced, barely a year later it’s dying again.
The screen is eating up the battery like me drinking water on a hot California weather.
That's fine, but it's also entirely different from saying that the phones are objectively unstable and bad for everyday use.
Is it enough data so that, as a consumer looking to purchase one, I would be concerned? Probably.
Is it enough data that I'd expect some engineer at Google (or wherever) to pay attention and address? Certainly, I would expect some engineering team to pay attention to public forums and address issues as they arise. It doesn't seem to be happening. If these phones are supposed to be a flagship items, and I think it's reasonable to claim that they are, it's also reasonable to expect flagship support.
The firm that has an interest in everyone thinking there's no data, and that we should withhold judgement.
There's not a lot of good choices here, either you assume that because there's no info, everything is fine, or you assume that the one guy complaining is one of many.