What exactly do you mean by "in demand"? Obviously the demand is not zero but all of the evidence points to it being a tiny fraction of the overall phone market

What exactly do you mean by "in demand"? Obviously the demand is not zero but all of the evidence points to it being a tiny fraction of the overall phone market. If the SE was actually wildly popular I doubt they would have stopped making small phones. Sony was the only company making smaller Android phones for years (last model introduced 2018) and their marketshare was plummeting pretty much the whole time. Then they stopped making them presumably because very few people were buying them.