Zero chance the marketing department will let them give up the extra $400 or whatever they get to charge for the bare minimum storage and RAM upgrades on all their devices.
I think it's silly to think the marketing department gets to control the pricing, but it is definitely very true that the "starting at <great price>" is very powerful for them. Even beyond Apple, it warps and distorts the entire laptop field pricing because people who don't understand how inadequate the entry level model is will compare that price to an entry-level model of Lenovo, or Dell, etc and make conclusions. Even on HN I've seen people use the "starting at" price of macs as a way of "proving" that "the Apple tax isn't much."
So yes, there is tremendous marketing value from that low starting price, although I think it's nearing the end of it's usefulness now that even fan sites are starting to call out the inadequacy.
I don't think that they are inadequate, these devices are perfect for most of my family. They do some calls, messages, a couple of pictures here and there, basic word processing and web browsing but not much more on these devices.
I had a Macbook with 8GB RAM and 256GB disk as my daily driver for work until last year running Docker and my fat IDE without too many issues. It's a similar story with my phone - I bought the bigger storage version because I thought I'd need it but after 3 years of using it I'm still not close to even using 128GB.
So yes, there is tremendous marketing value from that low starting price, although I think it's nearing the end of it's usefulness now that even fan sites are starting to call out the inadequacy.