The base iPhone 15 is still a “premium” phone, it costs 2x as much as Google’s A series phones, and google never had a problem putting USB 3 on those. Maybe most people won’t do this, but it’s obviously important enough that they didn’t do the same on the pro version. It’s so weird to see people defending a company purposely gimping their phones just to give them upsells.
The pro has a new processor that they’ve added usb3 to. The base uses the last generation processor which did not have that.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about their intentions and claiming that people are defending bad behavior, but it really just looks like you don’t know what you’re talking about.