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In my country, for example, buying phones from carriers as part of your plan just isn't a thing. As in, you couldn't do it even if you wanted to. Same for postpaid plans and contracts.

As a result, quite a lot of people use the "I can't believe they could make and sell an entire phone at this price" Xiaomi and similar phones.

Name the country if you want this to be a useful data point.

You could have checked their profile.

I'm not clicking the username of every commenter I read just to account for details they should've put in the comment.

Well too bad, otherwise you would have found it quicker than the time it took to write two comments.

Nah, the comments I'm responding to don't really take that much effort. ;P

I've only seen the carrier locked phones and long-term contracts in a handful of countries. I've lived in a lot of countries on three continents.

In many places the default is prepaid SIMs with separately purchased phones. Sometimes the prepaying can be automated (e.g. in Russia), sometimes it involves you physically going to a shop once a month or so (e.g. in Egypt).

The planet is full of such countries, it isn't only me.