They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them.
And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.
They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience.
They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone
I see this every day in our video calls. There's always
1. The user whose jabra headset is intermittently cutting in or out, or whose airpods are empty, who then switches to macbook speakers & microphones
2. The user user whose left airpod is still playing music from the iphone and only the right airpod did the handover correctly
3. The user whose airpods manage to noise cancel his own voice away
And this isn't every now and then, I see at least two out of these three users every single day. No matter which company, which client, every single day, for years. This is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely maddening.
And honestly, I don't care about the cable tangling or snagging if it at least reliably works.
Then there's the other issue of latency. Wireless headphones, even airpods on MacBooks, have horrible and unpredictable latency. The OS tries to hide it from you, but if you're doing live video/audio/broadcast, they're absolutely useless. I do volunteer work in that field, and over the past years it's gotten worse and worse with volunteers bringing wireless headphones, which they can't use for critical audio/video work.
And honestly, I don't care about the audiophile grade quality, we had good enough quality for free in every device, there was no reason to remove the 3.5mm port. Every current-gen midrange phone still has them, and Sony even keeps them on the flagships (which is why I buy Sony, and recommend everyone else to do so as well).
It's great that the best-case scenario is better. But like with FPS, the experience is primarily determined not by the average, but by the 95th percentile.
Also I think the more serious issue is the SD card slot. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but you can work around it with an adapter. Not so for the card slot
You can work around the SD card just as "easily" as you can work around the card slot, as you can just always keep a usb-c sd card reader plugged into the phone.
Obviously, both of them are absolutely silly "solutions" to problems that wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
It is an insurmountable hassle as none of my other devices — cameras, beltpacks, intercoms, mixing consoles — use or support usb-audio, nor will they ever.
It's already enough of a hassle to add/remove the 3.5mm/6.35mm headphone adapter, I don't need to have another adapter I can lose.
Aside from that, the whole usb-c stuff is so much more sensitive to dust and dirt, I wouldn't even want to have a usb-c adapter on my headphones.
While I currently buy Sony phones, for a while I had a phone without 3.5mm port and ended up just supergluing a splitter cable & headphone adapter to the back of it. But you have to replace it regularly as even with a right-angle usb-c connector the twist and turn is too tight to survive more than a few months.
And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.