Pretty much all the good engineers I knew on the US and Taiwan side left years ago.
Once Samsung started dropping $B on marketing it was unfortunately only a matter of time. Your average consumer doesn't do deep research and tends to just buy what's advertised heavily.
I mean, it's likely because it is really hard to differentiate in the smartphone market. The things that change y/y are kind of minute details in the scheme of things. (It's not like a competitive smartphone today would release without a GPS chip, for example)
Once Samsung started dropping $B on marketing it was unfortunately only a matter of time. Your average consumer doesn't do deep research and tends to just buy what's advertised heavily.
Source: Ex-HTC from '10 era.