Does anyone really care about the phone part of "phones" anymore? Even my parents text me far more often than they call these days. I'm sure I'm an outlier, but I would say browsing, email, text, nav, camera, ..., phone. Honestly with the ratio of spam phone calls I receive, I might prefer a smart "phone" that didn't even accept incoming calls.

Agreed, but I have some more reasons for why the "phone" part of the phone isn't really much of a factor when it comes to buying a phone these days.

At this point in time, texting+phone parts of the phone are pretty good and uniform across all devices, so it isn't a differentiating factor that people care about anymore imo. The only "texting" part of the modern phones that is still somewhat of a differentiator is iMessages, but that's about it.