I know your question was rhetorical, but when I think about this, it took close to 20 years of Linux maturing on the desktop before I felt comfortable handing a family member a laptop running Linux. As an enthusiast, I started running it much earlier, but everyday tasks like "printing" or "using Wi-Fi" prevented it from being a daily driver.
Personal computing, though, had a much deeper hacker culture, that encouraged pushing the hardware to its limits, and doing new and novel things with it. Progress stemmed from that (Windows including BSD sockets, for instance). I've never seen anything similar in the phone ecosystem - as soon as you play outside of the walled garden, you drop off into fringe territory. And the PinePhone, as much as I love it, is by definition outside of the walled garden.
I'm not sure, given the culture around phones, we might ever get to the point of it being viable.