Should I buy a Pixel or a Samsung?

It's not 2k at all. Last year's 256G model, which is what I have, is 799 on Amazon, against 999 of the S23 ultra with the same spec. This year's 1 V is 1399 on Amazon, which was the launhc price of the 1IV last year. I presume the S24 flagship will launch at about that price, too.

So yeah, it's a flagship priced like a flagship.

The "niche phone" angle is the reviewer angle, I suppose, because they review phones like fashion accessories. My take on it was yeah, it's the flagship most directly designed for photo enthusiasts who like manual settings and the Sony software. The features I want (swappable storage, wired headsets, front-facing stereo speakers, no notches or punch-holes) are all a side effect of making it a great phone for photographers. I don't use the hardcore photo stuff, but the design choices made for that reason all suit me just fine.

Like I said, the only things I miss are Samsung's great second screen support through Dex and the reassurance that point-and-click photography will get AI'd to death into something watchable no matter what. But the tradeoff is more than acceptable. I am genuinely very pleased with it. Some people reported heating issues with last year's model, but I never hit those and they seem to be better this year.

Expandable storage is pretty useful for someone who has a large library of music (especially a library in lossless formats).

I am in planes sometimes. I have no music subscriptions. I take RAW copies of my photos (which the phone does, that's the flipside of the mediocre processing for the camera) AND I play a bunch of games on that thing during flights. Not even phone games, although that too. Emulation is a use case for me.

Plus, internal storage is sold at a massive premium. Why pay hundreds to dobule my 256 gigs of storage when I can pay tens for a terabyte?

Oh, and this thing does hotswappable cards, too. So yeah, if you want to record hours of 4K video, then swap cards and record several more hours, you absolute can. For extremely cheap.

Why would you NOT want expandable storage?

EDIT: For the record, since you raise it, I would lose no data from this phone if I lost it. I get the same remote wipe options you get elsewhere, and everything that needs to stick around does get a cloud copy, including that music and games. But the bonus is I still get very cheap offline access to all that data without having to download it each time and a ton of additional storage for high quality originals of my photos and recordings before free cloud storage has their way with them. Not to mention easy ways to move data back and forth without relying on networking. Again, why would you not want that?

Why not have more storage on your phone for photos or music and then have that backup to a server? I encourage you to try to recover data from your broken phone. Much easier to read data from a unencrypted HDD then take a phone apart and try to read the bytes off it. You just keep all sensitive data on your phone's internal storage.