I just use an old quality phone. I got a Nexus 5 in 2015 very cheap, and it works great to this day. Nexus 5X's price is on the way down, and there are plenty of other quality cheap phones to have, like the Chinese models. Some will need a new ROM, though, so one should check out CM devices page before buying.
In my experience, buying these phones offers a better experience than many of the flagship Samsungs which suffer from bloated, slow and unintuitive software.
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).