USB IO speed aside, Apple’s phones have gotten to the point where 3 and 4 year old chipsets are still VERY performant. They now have the wiggle room to put more bleeding edge silicon in top tier phones, be ok with smaller yields at first, and scale fabrication over the year.
That all being said, given that everyone was going to been eyeing this USB port, they probably should’ve taken one on the chin and changed the stupid IO speed. Although, the people complaining about this probably aren’t Apple’s core market anyway. So maybe they were right.