Problem is that Apple just isn't nimble enough to do anything about it. Everything important about these phones was set in place before there was a pandemic.
There’s a good chance that some of the production pipelines for parts began spooling up months ago. Producing that many phones is a huge undertaking with longer lead times than most people imagine, I imagine that they’d lose billions, and they’d risk releasing a “pandemic-friendly” phone once the pandemic is actually over.
You’re not wrong, but there’s also no way in hell Apple was not going to keep their pipeline moving so long as they were able to. It’s not like Apple hasn’t been affected by the pandemic as much as everyone else has; stalling to bring TouchID into this year’s model probably wouldn’t have seen this series of phones released until almost summer next year. Might as well release what they’ve prepared and hopefully rejigger next year’s lineup if it didn’t call for any kind of inclusion of TouchID.
I have a work and personal phone, the work phone has FaceID and I do prefer it, but I intentionally swapped my personal phone out for an iPhone SE because it has TouchID. Any other year, I would have preferred FaceID, but given current conditions and possible future conditions, I would like it to really be either/or with both the FaceID array on top and TouchID built into the side button at some point in the future.
Problem is that Apple just isn't nimble enough to do anything about it. Everything important about these phones was set in place before there was a pandemic.