RANT: why are we going backwards in terms of development of smartphones !??

I was looking to buy a phone yesterday and realised that none of the phones released this year (12k & above), are having a dedicated memory card slot! I find this infinitely stupid!! Just a few years ago, Asus, Samsung and some other brands were highly praised for having a dedicated memory card slot, and now none of the brands have it ?? I understand access to internal memory is faster than external memory, but why not provide both !? For users like me who are especially into mobile photography, this is a real pain in the ass. It feels like all the companies are kind of forcing people to buy the higher priced, higher internal storage variant. If one needs anymore storage than that, then they'll be shoving their cloud storage service down the user's throat. And if you don't want to pay for storing your data in some cloud, then good luck! This is an extremely greedy, backward, un-sustainable move... We shouldn't be enabling this !!