I think part of the problem may be not taking advantage of external storage. I have an older Android phone with 32Gb internal storage and a 128Gb MicroSD card. I haven't had any storage problems because most big files go to the external storage without any effort on my part. I still have 10 Gb internal storage available, which is fine for my needs.
I have an old Nook eBook reader that I haven't used in a very long time because if became impossible to update. There was an Android update that said it would let you configure external storage as a seamless extension of the internal storage. There was just one problem: Android insisted that Android's Apps be stored in internal memory. The poor old Nook only had 8 Gb of internal memory (what do you expect for only $49). The OS took almost 4 Gb, the Android Apps also took almost 4 Gb, leaving less than 100 Mb. After a while it became impossible to update and now it's in a box somewhere with all its other abandoned bretheren.
If you buy a phone without a microsd slot that is exactly your own fault. They are still available. But tend to get less, because people think it's uncool and buy phones without, but 2 years later they whine about too small storage...
Although you're not wrong, the app bloat is still a problem. SD cards are slower than internal storage in almost all cases except for ultra cheap phones (during random access and sometimes even during sustained read or write) so running apps of them is annoying.
App developers should keep their app sizes down instead of driving everyone to add ridiculous amounts of external storage.
Android has pretty much cut off external storage support. You used to be able to move apps and all kinds of things over but I haven’t seen that in a long time.
Problem is SD cards are so incredibly slow that when you move apps over, the whole phone is stuck waiting and performance severely degraded. I’d much rather just buy a phone with as much storage as I need out of the box and know it will be high performance flash.
Even without external storage - my phone has just 64GB internal - I don't find myself using even half of it. Yet I often hear people saying they run out of storage. I don't know what I'm doing differently; my app list isn't hyper-minimalist or anything
My apps are all set up so that music, photos and videos all go to external storage. I have a 128Gb MicroSD card, and I'm using less than a quarter of the space.
I have an old Nook eBook reader that I haven't used in a very long time because if became impossible to update. There was an Android update that said it would let you configure external storage as a seamless extension of the internal storage. There was just one problem: Android insisted that Android's Apps be stored in internal memory. The poor old Nook only had 8 Gb of internal memory (what do you expect for only $49). The OS took almost 4 Gb, the Android Apps also took almost 4 Gb, leaving less than 100 Mb. After a while it became impossible to update and now it's in a box somewhere with all its other abandoned bretheren.