>How often do you actually break your iPhone that you can’t retrieve data from it?

I don't know. How often do you need to make an emergency call via Satellite to have emergency services rescue you from the wilderness? For most people the answer is also "almost never". But it's clearly big enough of a deal for Apple to flex it in every iPhone 14 ad. Same thing applies here. Even if you probably won't need to use it any time soon, it's good to have the feature there. Why remove it?

$165 is still pretty steep for a spare phone.

If it's just something to keep in the glove box in case of an emergency, I'm not going to invest $165 into it. An iPhone 6 (usually around $50-60 in used condition) would do the trick.