We are in agreement that phones (and embedded devices in general) are worse. My claim is that they are worse because UEFI is too fucking complicated to implement, so nobody bothered. Which resulted in linux being built with the hardware descriptor table for the device in question, itself implemented by the vendor and published (and eventually merged upstream) due to gpl restrictions. It's also not uncommon for the 2026 edition to use a completely different SoC than the 2025 version (as in different vendor and even CPU arch) - routers even do this for the same model with a different hardware revision.

As to your other point, software is always easier to change than hardware, even if easy means hooking up a ch341a chip. Hardware however always transitions from sand to electron prison to rock to sand.