No, they can pay less than $120 on a new phone in the budget tier which will be at least comparable in capabilities to a 5 year old phone in any tier and also have about 2 years of life.
That works out to around fifty bucks per supported year, and you aren't creating a mountain of e-waste by throwing away a perfectly good phone every other year.
Granted it might be faster (though looking at Geekbench scores between budget Android phones [0] and the 5-year-old iPhone XS [1] I’m not overly convinced of that either), but the price of manufacturing “nice” doesn’t drop nearly as fast as silicon.
Budget phones often compromise on build and camera and screen quality (even though the latter two often look great on spec sheets) and I think the average person would notice that far more than raw performance.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2900039
Aside from all the other problems a genuine pixel 3 (or iPhone XS) battery is bellow 3000 mah, so like replacing your redmi battery with a defective one.
I think its great that phones are being supported for 7 years but in a way it is a marketing chip based on consumer's using unrealistic linear depreciation.
Some consumers can pass down, repurpose, or only need very basic things, but most consumers need much of the relative performance they first bought, break screens, can't handle embedded battery replacement logistics, etc, so most probably have replaced something like the iPhone SE before 4 years is up and are paying more than they would have expected.
The single core performance of the current Samsung A14 is about a third of the currently sold iPhone SE.
If you're going to keep the same device many years, don't buy something with slow performance right out of the gate.
A refurbished iPhone SE 2023 that has a new battery and working screen is probabilistically worth more than the iPhone 2023 you buy today, and will be less than $200 unless there's a serious shortage because they have a high failure rate?
In my thinking the cost of similar products in an industry like tech is the best available estimate of how much environmental damage is involved (I.e. upgrading tooling is itself likely to produce waste) so planning to buy a $400 phone once every 7 years and actually buying one every 2 is much worse than trying to get 3-4 years out of what people have tried to make with popular runs of somewhat outdated commodity parts.