Honestly I’d disagree. Past the iPhone 4S, my iPhone 8 was fine through it’s life before being replaced with a 13 mini a year or two ago when it suffered a naked gravitational incident at my hands. My parent’s generally had hand-me-downs or used models and dad’s 6s is still kicking and performing alright and even got a security patch a month ago.
They had that battery snafu which I will absolutely fault their lack of transparency for (good ol’ hide-the-workings-from-customers Apple) but I did encounter the issue it sought to trade performance for preventing in the past. (a worn battery causing random reboots on my 6s)
Now my BlackBerry Priv? I miss that phone but I did not miss it’s combination of slowing down with age plus updates running out at 6.0.1. Worst of both worlds but I miss sliders and Blackberry’s additions. (not the size though)
Similar in age (2015 models) but I doubt dad would be as tolerant of how it performed even a few years ago.