I still use a Nokia GSM phone from 2005. I replaced the battery once, somewhere around 2010, and that battery is still going... can't say strong, but acceptably.
And don't get me wrong, this is not excellent technology. The firmware is buggy, for such a simple thing. Everything was rushed to market back then, just like today. One of the funnier ones is, the alarm clock feature sometimes fails to alarm. People have hard time believing that "excuse" when being late in the morning, and I had hard time believing it myself, but once I caught it red-handed blinking the "wake up" alarm without the sound, and then as a side effect (bugs often come with those things), losing all icons from the menu until restart.
But it works, I can call and reply to SMS messages. It has some rudimentary web browsing stuff, but it did not realistically work even when brand new.
I have not looked at buying a smartphone. I first said I'll do it in 2015, then 2020, now let's say... 2030? And despite the fear mongering, the 2G network is not actually going anywhere, given all the legacy internet-connected things like security alarms etc. Numerous times there have been "definite" dates when it's going down, never happened.
And whenever some bullshit company or service requires me to install an "app", I simply take my business elsewhere.
Modern-day internet went crap already around 2006-2007, Youtube and blogs killed web pages. Discussion forums survived a bit longer but Facebook killed them a few years later, EEVblog is one of the rare beasts that still lives strong.