I recently bought a NOS Samsung Note 10 Lite. A quarter the price of the S24, has the wonderful S-Pen and a headphone jack. And even though the battery is ostensibly not user replaceable, it is an easy job that can be done in five minutes without risking breaking anything else.

Similarly, I now have a Samsung Galaxy A52, which has a headphone jack and a microSD slot (but no user-replaceable battery).

I'm not particularly price conscious, so I feel like Samsung lost out on an opportunity to sell me a flagship phone because those no longer have these features I care about. Luckily, this much cheaper phone still has the two that are most important to me. When they stop offering them at all, I'll be done with Samsung.

You just explained something that I've been noticing more and more lately. A decade ago, the early adopters and nerds would have the flagship phones, and everybody else would have the cheap phone. Today the power users are using the absolute cheapest phones and the general public has the flagships.