Gotta say, I miss when modding my android stuff was fun rather than irritating and time-consuming for no good reason. Maybe it's just that I have less of it these days. I'm a lot less inclined to use custom ROMs or root or do much of anything these days partly because I'm growing more and more apathetic (some would say growing up, I vehemently deny these allegations) and, some of it I'm sure, being charitable, is that the stock experience on phones has by and large been cleaned up compared to the bad old days of TouchWiz and its contemporaries. There was a time I considered Samsung phones nigh-unusable without a custom ROM or at least a custom launcher. Nowadays they're about the only Android manufacturer I can stand at all. I miss LG.
I can't believe I'm saying this and I can hear my younger self screeching 'hypocrite!' in my mind, but I don't really care for some of the features I used to like microSD card slots and 3.5mm jacks. microSD is too slow for what I'd want to use it for and most phones can't pack the DAC/amp needed to run good quality headphones anyway, so why not let it be something that hangs off of your USB-C port. Since you can't install Android apps to the SD card anymore anyway, half the point IMO of having the slot has been moot for almost a decade at this point. That said, since phones are just black glass slabs these days that don't have much to distinguish themselves aside from the number, we're really starting to hit the plateau like we did with Core2/Sandy PCs in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I honestly see my ip13 lasting until Apple kills it off provided the battery holds up and I don't chew it up too bad. I'd probably still have been on my Xr if it hadn't had a screen problem.