'Solved' by having measurably worse ingress protection than leading smartphones?
Yes, this is solved. Samsung makes rugged IP68 phones with user swappable batteries that are thinner than an iPhone 17 Pro when factoring the camera bump [1].
My experience with phones like that are that they tend to fall apart when subjected to impact, which is pretty counterproductive to features like, I don’t know, being able to use the phone immediately after an impact (car crash, fall).