To be fair, their software/security support is longer than any others that I'm aware of. They beat out even Samsung in that regard.
Only one that's close/better is Fairphone and they still have a looong way to go before they can compete in terms of quality and audience.
But I agree that their physical durability and repairability could seriously improve.
Wasn't Apple accused of intentionally slowing down older phones as a tactic to get consumers to upgrade? IIRC they paid a huge settlement in court over it. Which I guess isn't necessarily an admission of guilt, but it doesnt look very good.
The issue really is less “evil” than that. They keep adding features running in the background which add to the load on a CPU. Combine that with some of those new features running better with newer versions of microcode and it quickly makes it appear as though they are intentionally slowing it down, while in reality they are just adding more shit to the system to run on top of your day to day workload.
Never really had an issue with iPhone outside of the glass screen, but more recent Gorilla Glass offerings have mostly fixed that issue for me. I do love what Fairphone is doing.