Media has the follow the money, and for as long as media is paid by advertising, then they have to report on stuff that gets the most salience even if it's proportionally irrelevant.
The phone is the critical root identity anchor for most of the world now. And many countries outside of the west has already made the Sim card a root identity. Additionally to make it trustworthy (think Google wallet and digital wallets and so on) to work they cannot trust the end user because effectively you the user don't own your own identity. So that's why the phone has to be proprietary - so that it's secure element can be trusted in interactions with the state-big-tech nexus. I talked about my experience with this while attempting to cross borders in SEA. https://polykey.com/blog/architecting-anti-fragile-trust-at-...