The same people are mostly still around. But the people who talked about Apple being superior in form or function despite being inferior in profit back in the 90s are not the people who today talk about how Apple is great because they're so crazy profitable.

Chip performance is the bottleneck everything on a phone has to run through. It can give a proprietary boost to a brand if they put out better performing chipsets. Is it the only thing in a phone that matters? God no! But a better chipset allows the peripheral tech (touchscreens, cameras, etc) to do more sophisticated stuff more easily. So chipset performance affects the big picture more than any other component.

It's hard to zoom out and compare peripherals and overall design without getting into personal taste and preference. To measure personal taste empirically, you could look at profits. Higher profit means people aren't buying on price but on perceived value and personal preference.

iPhone is a huge winner here. Apple actually books a majority of the smartphone industry profits every quarter -- more profit than every other company combined (in 2015 it was 91%). It's hard to charge high margins when you don't have some proprietary unfair advantage like faster CPUs.

Samsung et. al sell more phones and have more revenue, but they make a fraction of the money because their value prop competes on price. In fact, Samsung is the only other company that made a profit selling smartphones in 2015, everyone else lost money or broke even. CPU performance is a huge part of that story. Samsung has the second fastest CPUs. That's a difference between first place and second place of almost 100 billion dollars. Third place is you're fired.