200 million iPhones sold in a year, and you want them made less robust and more expensive to build and repair because a handful of people can't back them up on jungle rides?
If your goal is to reduce ewaste, then refurb phones meet that goal. If you now want to move the goalposts and say you want guaranteed data retention or something, then it's another example of what I said earlier: people namecheck ewaste because it sounds like moral high ground but they're really interested in something else.
I'll say it again, everything involves tradeoffs. In a product this highly evolved, everything you do is at the expense of something else. You seem to be interested in a finer grained level of repairability than is currently possible to satisfy some narrow hypothetical case. I'm not interested in my product getting bigger, less robust, or more expensive on the off chance it helps some careless jungle rider or outback tourist.
I do, however, trade in or return for recycling every Apple product I no longer use. My computers, phones and watches tend to last me 5 to 8 years regularly, generally without need for repair. For whatever reason Apple seems to tempt me with new iPads more often than I'd expect, but the previous generations also go back to Apple.
