[makeitdouble]

If we look at the Pixel 4a which was a 5"8 screen, straight in the middle of the mini (5"4) and the regular iPhone (6"1). It had extremly good sales, and of course the super low price is a major factor in it, but it also was very well reviewed and people flocked to it as one of the best smallish phone at the time.

Then of course Google just went bigger for their garbage 5G variant of it which just trashed battery life, and all subsequent phones doing ML with the Tensor processor also went bigger.

It makes me think it's not a matter of commercial success, or even if there's a market for it. The issue is probably the massive incentives on the maker side to push a bigger battery to deal with more computation and push the device price upper to get better margins.