> I miss the days of that first google device where I could just pop the back and replace the battery,

1. That's not a "Google device", you mean a smartphone.

2. For a large fraction of the smartphones available today (probably also Google Pixel's), you can still pop the back and replace the battery. The popping may be a bit more complicated, but it's doable. Naturally there's a tradeoff between convenient ergonomics for battery replacement and smaller dimensions of the phone case.