Surely you haven’t tried all Android phones out there, so why make such a generalizing comment? I’m daily driving a mediocre Pixel 4a and have no such issues. I also tried an iPhone 11 Pro alongside my Pixel for a few months. What an unwieldy brick that was and they’re only getting heavier. Notifications handling and navigating the settings suck big time, and overall it felt very restricting to use.

I suppose it's all personal preference past a point..

I tried switching from an old Pixel 3 to a new iPhone recently and just couldn't get on with it. Simple things like not being able to order the home screen how I want it drove me nuts.

Dropped back to a Pixel 4a (5G) and I'm very satisfied. No issues with sluggish performance that I've seen.

I switched to an Iphone 11 Pro last year after many years with Android, but I'm going back to Android when two years has passed (I'm on agreement to be able to switch every 2 years), although I would happily look into /e/ instead. One and a half years with IOS has been a misery so far, due to lack of separate media volume the switch is almost always on silent - thus I regularly misses many calls. I feel shortage of RAM on IOS, and the way they have solved it is by having some form of pseudo multi tasking.