The worst part about most phones of any era is that they become ruined with sinister bloatware, designed to funnel you into dark patterns of paying for garbage that burns any trust you might invest into a device, until it's a charred unregocnizable mess.
Unfortunately, even now, if they made a device that was purported to be "dumb" and no-frills, I probably wouldn't believe that the phone were as pared-down as I might wish to believe, simply because I'd be sure that the chipsets available to manufacturers might actually possess far greater power under the hood, than some simple throwback of a handset might seem to house.