It's really bizarre how phone gaming's golden age was before the smartphone era, having buttons helped a lot. Later java ME games and symbian everything were very cool, I still listen to the songs of Asphalt 4 to this day.
Don't get me wrong there are cool games too after mihoyo started getting ambitious, but they also ported their games to PC and consoles where it's better to play.
the current day phones gaming capability is massively hindered by the shit storm you have to sift through in order to play any of them. Most of which is due to shitty advertisement companies having malicious ads and intrusive practices. It's basically a hard requirement nowadays to use some sort of DNS blocker for them