Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible.

Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money.

The electric drive was the killer feature on the Tesla. Without it the car has no reason to exist.

Also, by luxury car standards the interior of a Tesla is absolutely subpar. They were competing against cars with handcrafted mahogany dashboards and precision stitched leather seats where people will spend hours and days fine tuning the static and moving resistance on the heater control knob to get it just perfect.

But their strategy was still go to after the high end market, instead of try to target the low end market and go up.

That is true, and it works because there is a market for high end vehicles. The market is there because the high end companies make a product that is measurably better than the mass market product from traditional manufacturers.

Such a thing really isn't possible in the cell phone market. A tiny shop can't build a phone notably better than an iPhone or a Galaxy. The only luxury phone provider I know about just glued diamonds on old dumbphones and went out of business.

Essential was apparently banking on people finding the modularity concept to be a killer feature worth a price premium, but that has not been the case apparently.

Not initially, no. The all electric drive-train and buying into the future was always the key hook for early adopters. I think a large part of early demand was not because it was the best car for the money, but because it was special, unique, and you believed in Tesla the company and wanted it to succeed.