Most of that is because the OS defaults write about 20 times more crap than anyone needs, and devs consistently do not care about preserving write cycles. There's still a culture of "Beautiful code is everything, hardware is disposable and meant to be upgraded".
An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.
Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.
But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.
Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.
But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.