As much as this is good advice, folding phones with problems like this seem a bit beyond the usual year 1 cautionary tales. These seem like the kind of design issues that should be ironed out in the early days of product design. Some elements of these phones (like the way the screen can be physically separated from the rest of the device, easily and accidentally) should have been killed at the conceptual stage.
Why are these companies fucking up their brand image like this?
Phones right now are near-identical super-competent black slabs. They look the same, work the same, last for years, and increasingly the only reason to pay for an expensive phone is as a pointless status symbol. Samsung are already looking at declining sales as people upgrade less frequently, but they also have to worry about the possibility that people will start figuring out that they can buy mid-end (non-Samsung) devices for a whole lot less than a new Galaxy flagship phone, and struggle to see a performance difference even side-by-side.
That's also the reason for curved glass displays, the race to remove the bezels, and why this year's phones have half a dozen cameras and sensors on the back in a big clump. It's also part of the drive towards 5G and 120Hz+ screens. Phone companies just want anything at all that differentiates their phones from the others, and folding phones are an instantly noticeable differentiator.
Even if the phone display has no issues it's a $1400 phone that is competitive with $300 regular smartphones
Yeah, that's another really silly aspect. It's so far above flagship prices and so far below flagship specs. Unless someone values the flip feature as being worth well over a thousand Euro all by itself, there's a giant pile of better phones.