The smartphone industry's decision making in the last few years has been... bizarre. I've been an Android user up to this point because I appreciated the vast feature set, open architecture and diversity of hardware that I could find. That initially meant settling for a lot of the quirks and general cheapness of early Android phones - Apple had them all so thoroughly beat on polish. With the advent of really good high-end phones from Samsung and others, and the great advancements in Android's software, it seemed to me that we were getting to the point that there was no particular reason why anyone should prefer an Apple smartphone over any of the other high-end options.
The phablet craze and the ridiculous explosion in screen size should have tipped me off that something was very wrong with the industry. It didn't make sense to me that literally no-one would offer a phone that was small enough for one-handed use. And then they started eliminating the headphone jacks. And then... the notch. Multi-billion dollar development teams started chasing each other down degenerate design paths. The modern smartphone is this weird art project that's uncomfortable to interact with, and doesn't have a lot of basic features I use. Swappable battery? Expansion slot for microsd? Rare, and getting rarer.
Worse, Google seems to have totally abandoned the initial premise behind Android, and every handset manufacturer has erected a walled garden filled with bloatware and with no expectation of any future support. If I'm going to live in a walled garden, I would rather live in a nice one.
I won't put the iPhone SE on a pedestal. It's older hardware, and you're definitely sacrificing some battery life and camera quality (two of the few positives of these modern phablets). But I can reach across the whole screen with my thumb, and I can listen with any set of headphones I want, and it's really very pleasant to use - after only half a day of use, it has just seamlessly disappeared into my life. Exactly as it should.