I really liked the Nexus Line of Google phones and from what I’ve seen the Pixels are great phones, but the price puts them outside of what I want to pay.
The 3a, and the 6a might be the only ones I considered, but the rest are just “Flagship priced phones” and yeah they may have the hardware to back them up, but paying 600+ dollars for a phone is ridiculous. With them reaching for a thousand dollars is a hard no.
You basically hit on it. They’re trying to make them into iPhones… people are on Android specifically because they don’t want Apple prices, or that type of enviroment.