It’s not like it’s the flagship model. The Pro is the flagship with ProMotion and USB 3.2. The non-Pro and SE are lesser ships in the fleet with lesser features. Same situation as the iPad Pro vs. Air and other models. I am squarely mid-range with my iPhone 13 mini and iPad Air 4, and the only Pro feature tempting me is Face ID on iPad because work authentication through Touch ID feels tedious compared to Face ID on iPhone.
Most budget phones have usb 3.0 these days. Here's 74 phones under $300 with it. Many have had it for a close to a decade already. This is a transparent ploy to force people onto cloud services by making local sync incredibly slow.
Which days are “these days”? If it’s the past couple of years, the number is 13. That’s not most. Going back a decade, 74 out of 1,654 is also not most. Many? Sure. But most phones with USB-C are USB 2.0, and no one cares except people who don’t use iPhones but love to complain about them.
Most people are not going backwards to plug in their phones to backup data. Even those who do backup locally do so over Wi-Fi, which is now faster than USB 3. Fast, wired transfer is absolutely a necessity for professionals moving A/V data. The iPhone Pro is for them. For the rest of us, it’s not something I’d need, even if I was still doing regular local backup these days.