I had the same thought initially, but the reality is that the amount of rework required in terms of design, development, QA and production (parts, production lines) will be huge at Apple’s scale. You probably have to plan features like that more than a year out, so they’d have to skip this generation (which they will have invested a huge amount it), which realistically was never going to happen.

I agree that the lack of Touch ID feels like a fairly big deal though. Face ID is useless right now and I don’t see things getting back to “normal” in terms of no mask wearing for some time, so I think I will wait and see if they bring it back next year.