Lots of phones still have those. Notably all Redmi phones have a SD card slot, and Redmi still sells new phones with IR blaster, and most have a headphone jack too.
I've looked into those phones, the specs look nice but they don't work in my region, unfortunately rural areas of the US don't have Tower support for those style models(yay refusal to upgrade any sort of infrastructure). many of my friends that are overseas have stated that they love the phones though.
Is it intentional? I figured it was because the US still predominantly uses the CDMA standard where none of their phones support the CDMA standard as a whole in favor of GSM and LTE the rest of the world uses
Yeah but they're all the lower end phones, all the major flagships removed the features three or four versions ago, I don't want to have to sacrifice camera or screen quality in order to have features that should be built into phones by default
I'm going to say that today, even on lower-end phones, the screen, processor and camera are all pretty decent.
I have a Motorola G31, which cost about 200€ one year ago, when I got it.
It has a Micro SD Card Slot and a headphone jack.
The screen is plenty good (1440p,60hz) (why would you need 120hz or 4k on a phone)
And the camera is also quite nice. It has no fancy features, but it takes pictures and that's all I need.
From my perspective, flagship phones are impractical and overpriced to say the least.
That's really that is why I went with the phone I have, out of the phones that I looked at all of them were a downgrade for the screen, and generally camera. Or lacked the tower support in my area since we barely have LTE