I feel people nowadays upgrade out of battery degradation rather than new features/specs.
phones became so damn frustrating to service that people just swap them when their batteries start to degrade, instead of swapping batteries and continue using it.
Hope this new iGP sorts out some issues with asymetric memory configs. In my experience with the iris xe 80CU version, going from 4gb soldered + 4gb DIMM to 4gb soldered + 16GB DIMM meant a non-trivial loss of performance. It seems the flex memory (8GB dual channel, 12GB single channel) config doesnt play well with how the GPU uses the memory channels.
Its a shame because its a pretty capable iGP but it is very prone to OEMs handicapping it with asinine soldered RAM configs that inhibit it from drawing all its potential.
There is a little bit of summary in your very opinionated post.