To be fair, the Pixel 1st Gen has a headphone jack. And the Pixel 2 has bluetooth 5.0 (compared to bluetooth 4.2 for the Pixel 1st Gen), which has significantly better range, reliability, speed, message capacity and data throughput. Google only dropped the jack for devices with bluetooth 5.0.

It's a weak defence, because multiple people had issues with bluetooth on the Pixel 2.