Which captures the original poster's point pretty perfectly: the Pixel line did completely abandon those value root until "budget flashship variant" recently became a thing throughout the industry...
which was mostly lead by Apple and the Xr
(and no, I'm not saying Apple made the first budget smartphone, they just popularized the idea of making a budget variant of a 12 hundred dollar phone and marketing them alongside one another)
The Xiaomi and Huawei phones offer much better values than the Pixel 4a, unless you put an enormous value on the software update situation (which of course is perfectly reasonable).
