I don't know if iOS does better in that regard, but it has other issues that make it painful to use as a daily driver.
That's a chicken and egg issue. The more performance you have the less the apps are optimized. We used to do incredible things on very limited hardware, now everything is a bloated piece of shit that uses 10-100x too much ressources
> Work expands so as to fill the time available for it's completion.
Programs expand so as to use the average hardware available to developers.
but... Android sucks because the default permissions and business model on Android all veer towards advertising, and this is heavy on network and bandwidth as well as background processing across lots of apps... and that drains battery and performance.
I switched to GrapheneOS and just disable network on many things like Camera, etc... the Cloud AI features are not worth it... I also run web apps instead of installed apps for the vast majority of things, if an app doesn't require some hardware capability that only an app can provide then it's staying as a web app, m.uber.com works, most news websites work best as web apps with the JS disabled... I routinely get multi-day battery and stellar performance by just not running apps that are always trying to continuously exfiltrate data about me.
I've found only 2 things that don't work the same on GrapheneOS: Revolution banking just does not work at all - so I closed my account with them, and AMEX forces 2FA on every sign-in - which I can tolerate. Nothing else was impacted, everything else is an improvement in performance and battery.
And yes, agreed, I can't live without mobile browser extensions. Tubular for YouTube is similarly indispensable.
The phone I have now is a Nokia branded something, can't remember the model name but it's about two years old. As fast as the day I bought it.
When one phone falls off the bottom of the stack another one goes on the top of the family stack. In service we have a 15 Pro, 13 Pro, 12, XR, 8 and the 6s. I'll push Pro phones down every two years now. Occasionally something needs a new battery and that's about it.
As for usability, there are a couple of problems but once you get used to it and why, meh. Safari+AdGuard (free) is excellent and a lot less dicky than Firefox on Android.