What is this, competitive smart phone use?

No, but the options are defeatist because they reflect my feelings related to the broad design trends of phones being bigger, and my preference for handling a phone one-handed. For me personally, it’s caving in (and frankly just clumsy feeling) to have to use both hands to handle phones (mainly in portrait orientation) that are in a weird size range that’s almost too big but not so much so that they’re no longer portable.

Also in my opinion while it’s absolutely **not ** a personal failure to use an accessory to help handle larger phones, it simply is a design failure. It’s like having to put a label on a door to tell people how to open it, that’s courtesy of a design failure that made opening the door ambiguous.

Anyway, 6.5" is a large phone to me, so that being a “standard” is why the phrasing is so defeatist. You’re stuck in an awkward compromise if you want a device more capable, get some less powerful but smaller option (e.g. Jelly), or something that even on the smaller end is still relatively large (e.g. Zenfone 8/9).