But that potentially implies that the regular Zenfone will no longer be a flagship, in the same way the regular Galaxy or Pixel phones are not the flagships for their respective manufacturers.
Neither of those phones are actually flagships. Like I get that some people just use that word to mean any phone with an 8 series Snapdragon but that's not actually what it means. The Galaxy Ultra and the Xperia 1 are the flagship phones for those manufacturers.
FYI: Zenfone 8 got 2 years of software support and they forcefully closed down the ability to root it almost right after support ended, even lying they will turn it back on to no avail.
I do not recommend anyone to choose an Asus as their next phone. Im ashamed I bought so much Asus PC parts since.
I didn't watch or read anything yet, but there's one thing I know about Asus phones: they look great on paper, they kind of suck ass in the real world. Heres why:
Shit software support with updates that break stuff every single time, and after the first year it's even more of an afterthought for them
They promised over a year ago they would bring back bootloader unlocking, we still have nothing
Hardware can brick itself overnight (look for Zenfone 8 Ramdump issues, this is due to a bad soldering of ram chips iirc, they did nothing to address this publicly)
They are sold in like 2.5 countries
Lots of people complaining about their customer service
They are very expensive for what they offer
Would not recommend. My Zenfone 8 lasted a year and a half before I could not use it anymore because of the worn out battery, and I kept it between 20 and 80% as much as I could. You may tell me that's normal for batteries to wear and that this phone was not the best on battery, but my point is more that there is virtually no way to get replacement parts outside of shady sellers on AliExpress, and I am NOT putting an AliExpress battery in my pocket.