Interesting. Different ways of managing expected frustration. Personally, I stick to highest-end phones I can afford, for the simple reason - I was once stuck for 3 years with a phone that was so crappy that it could barely lift its own OS - fire up any app, homescreen gets killed to save memory. Somebody calls you? 25% chance that you won't be able to pick it up, because the phone will hang. Try and turn on Internet on it? If you didn't turn off sync, you'll have to powercycle the phone by removing its battery to get it working again.
I don't break or lose phones often (in the last 3 years, I managed to crack the screen of my S4 two times; got the glass replaced both times for relatively little cost). But I use them quite a lot, every day. Minor frustrations like apps crashing, hanging, or taking 30 seconds to load tend to add up into quite a bit of frustration daily. So I prefer to save up and buy a phone that I know will work flawlessly for the next 3 years or so (and, like with S4, then I happily give it away to someone when I buy a new one; they can probably squeeze 3 more years off it too).
In my experience, buying these phones offers a better experience than many of the flagship Samsungs which suffer from bloated, slow and unintuitive software.
Don't buy or walk with expensive items around? Sounds like I am being snarky, but I am serious. In some cities or areas, it is not possible to have nice stuff around. Couldn't have a nice car in my old neighborhood. The old beater I had was scratched, hit and broken into multiple times. I didn't care too much, as it was already scratched and beat up anyway. If it was a nice new car, I would have been upset, but I would have never gotten a nicer car living in that part of town.
As for phone, I broke my old flip phone some years ago, by sitting on it. And I was upset about it obviously, it was a nice model then. I was student, bought it by saving for a while. Didn't have insurance and so on. And since then realized that it didn't make any sense for me to buy these expensive toys if they can easily be lost, stolen, broken _if_ it causes me so much anguish when happens. So since then I've bought used, or lower end smart phones (last one is a Moto G for $170 from 3-4 years ago) so that if it gets, broken, stolen, lost I wouldn't be too upset about it, just inconvinienced some, and would just go and buy another one. Kind of like buying another pair of pants or socks.
I one day if I win the lottery, maybe I'll be able to buy $500-$600 iPhones like that too. But today If I had one, and cracked or lost, I would be quite upset.
I am saying this because I've seen people sign contracts to buy these phones (which is basically getting a loan), buying insurance for them and so on, and all I am think "it sounds like you can't afford it". Can't obviously tell them that in person, but's that the idea.