> It's not that "many" of the components aren't available, it's all the components anyone cared about. It seems like you won't be able to swap out the CPU, GPU, RAM, battery or screen.
The article addresses this directly:
"After lots of research and testing, they made a big decision: rather than turn every single piece of the phone into modules, from the processor to the RAM to the hard drive, they’d consolidate all that into the standard frame. They found that people don't care about, or want to think about, the processor in their phone. And they especially don't want to worry about it being compatible with all their apps. Users just want a good phone with good specs that does all the basics well, and then they want a place to play on top of that."
They did the research. It turned out that people didn't care about those components after all.
If you think your research is better, build the product.