I mean sure you could create an all analog PID that reads out the temperature sensor in the tip and heats it accordingly and maybe displays the tips temperature — but then you would get all the disadvantages of analog without any of it's benefits.

I have multiple digital JBC soldering stations and the time from taking out the sleeping handle to having it heated to soldering temperature is so short you stop bothering even thinking about it.

And because the sensor is in the tips you can solder huge pads without the temperature of the tip going down enough to notice.

I am a guy who loves analog (in fact I build a lot of modular synthesizer stuff that is mostly analog computers), but in this case anything other than digital is silly, especially if you want your iron to do advanced things like extending the tips livetime by having a sleep mode that reacts to how often you took the tip out in the past minute etc.