I think you're over focusing on present phone performance as reflecting a lack of future interest in performance improvement, especially from the perspective of

I think you're over focusing on present phone performance as reflecting a lack of future interest in performance improvement, especially from the perspective of a vendor. No phone manufacturer, and especially not Google as the parent of the whole Android ecosystem, would willingly accept a future in which their devices did not improve at least _somewhat_ generation over generation. Doing so would guarantee losing market share to Apple in every market in the world. This entire lawsuit, one could argue, centers around the belief by some vendors (Qualcomm, Nuvia, etc) that in-house designs - even those made by small teams - can significantly outperform the designs that ARM produces and makes available via TLA licensing, and that (implicitly) the pace of ARM's own development is not fast enough or reliable enough to be competitive in the markets these vendors want to operate in.