i think the ire is because Apple fans believe it without questioning it, like flat earth believers being told that by a religious leader.
Sweeping generalization. What percentage of iPhone users are you suggesting that are like this? How would you even prove that? Marketing might get us to try something but we make up our own minds after that. You'd have to be imagining that the people that line up at the stores for days are actually representative of the iPhone using population. They're the fringe. Are most of us not numb to marketing by now anyway?
Even my apple fan coworker is always trying to convince me to move to IOS, for "new" features, and I have to say dude I have been doing that forever, I would gain nothing by moving to IOS and lose a ton of technical abilities where I use my phone like a PC...but people can't be convinced of what they already believe
Sounds like you made the right choices for you and I'm genuinely glad for you for that. Your issue is in thinking your logic should be everyone else's as well. The difference between us is that I also believe the Android fans chose their phones correctly based on what they prioritized. I have no reason to assume that such huge groups of people dealing with limited resources aren't distributed evenly across a spectrum of being discerning and of being frugal. There's hardcore fans throwing money at them that they don't have and on the other side there are people with plenty of money that just wait till the renewal is up and get the cheapest model and don't care much.