But of course if you take that argument to its logical conclusion we are back on feature phones that can only talk and text.
At some point it’s not just bloat and its actual functionality that customers demand.
For example, your 2011 netbook can’t do basic HD video streaming. Your new smartphone can play high quality console ported games (e.g., Resident Evil 7 is a Mac/iOS cross platform release).
But my point is that eventually that argument fades away with enough new capabilities. Incremental progress compounded eventually makes a big difference. When you say that the apps a few years ago did the same things that is not true. Apps used to do fewer things.
Some examples:
Older smartphones didn’t run machine learning on your photos to categorize them by person.
Smartphones used to take videos that we would consider to be unacceptable on a modern HDTV screen now because they didn’t have enough storage. I remember when 4K video had a time limit because the simple act of taking the video would overheat the processor. Now, people shoot entire films that get played in theaters using smart phones.
TikTok is the most popular social media app in the world and it was not possible to implement on prior phones with prior cellular networks. Continuous live video over a cellular network at scale with decent device battery life is a relatively new phenomenon.
Computational photography features like night mode and changing focus points after capture depend heavily on processing power to quickly analyze sensor input.
You can dismiss games as well, but the mobile gaming market is larger than the console gaming market. It is actually extremely important for a lot of people for phones to be capable of high-quality gaming. Top earners like Genshin Impact and Fortnite used to be games that you would upgrade to a higher spec phone to be able to play, and that trend will probably continue as new games hit the market.
I know that AI isn’t really useful yet via underbaked software like Apple Intelligence, but there is a decent argument to be made that local AI capability will bring significant new features that will be above and beyond what your 5 year old phone can do.
And it wouldn't be a potato were it not for the operating system and the apps' increased usage