welp, no chance I'm ever considering their phones in future

This is sad to see. Replying from Lineage OS on Asus.

It's funny that looking around almost every single piece of ASUS hardward I bought over the years, I chose them because I could do more with their kit than I could do with the cheaper stuff and a lot of that had to do with access to the hardware (overclockeability of things like motherboards and graphics boards, much more configurable and better hardware for routers and media players and so on).

So I'm wandering what exactly is their unique value proposition on smartphones versus brands which are much more well known and well established in the regular consumer segment if they're ditching being the superior choice for the more technical users: what exactly is the point of "same shit as everybody else" hardware for premium prices?!

Are they going to increase their abysmal security update support time?

If I ever come across anyone in the wild who actually has one I'll be sure to warn them not to root their phone.

asus has killed the possibility of me being a potential customer then lol

Very easy way to remove an almost perfect phone from my list of upgrade considerations.

Which means, legally, you can no longer own even the hardware of a Zenfone you bought, you now only license it. Since their OEM software is proprietary and in nearly every software's TOS they can revoke your license to it at any time for any reason, which would effectively brick the phone if bootloader unlocking is not possible.

So they will just be bricks in a few years