Old news, Apple has been overly greedy on storage pricing forever. I will never get the base model again though. The experience buying a base model with future updates and offloading content is detrimental to the overall experience. Always buy the next step, even though you think you can manage it for busy people it’s just too time consuming and stressful. The base model is basically only good for seniors who aren’t tech savvy.
64GB of storage is just fine for me. I'm not a senior (yet) and I'm pretty tech savvy
what are you storing on your phone that you need to offload content? if you were more tech savvy maybe you wouldn't be storing so much stuff on your phone?