Those days never existed. Even the first iPhones were like $500 and that was over a decade ago.
These prices are very high but phones last a lot longer than they used to and are improving a lot slower. I just bought a Pixel 8 for £400 which (accounting for inflation) is about the same price as we used to pay for three old Pixels and even Nexuses.
E.g. the Nexus 4 which was considered "mega cheap" was £279 for the 16GB model, which is £390 in today's money.
They're clearly going for price differentiation based on the model year, but you really don't need the latest model to have an amazing phone any more.
I miss the days when they'd give you a free phone for signing your cell service contract. Now they're like "but we don't make you sign a contract any more!". Bullshit. If you cancel service they demand full payment for the phone immediately. They still have people locked in. Granted, you can always get 0% interest directly from the manufacturer, but a lot of people don't qualify for that.
Collaboration with the Zionist state and scraping even more data via Chrome ad topics and unskippable YT ads not providing enough revenue to fund AI bs in the search?