> My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.

I mean, Apple also enforces a difference in what is an iPhone vs an iPad vs a Mac, at both the OS and the application levels, regardless of what little distinction the internals have. Even without bringing mainline Linux into it, Android is generally looser about that.

> I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop.

It doesn't have to be all the time; there are lots of use cases where big displays are occasional. Pocket gaming, for instance.