Valve won't be releasing a Steam Deck with more performance until at least 2025. Given the smartphone market's reputation for disappointing incremental updates, this is the right choice. Valve should, however, throw gamers a bone with a Steam Deck 1.5.
Annual phone refreshes make perfect sense.
You don’t have to buy a new one every year. But a stable production cycle is very useful at the volume Apple moves. Spikes and troughs for a multiple year cycle would be much more difficult to manage, and if you do actually need a phone at the end of a 3 or 5 year production cycle, you end up with a product 2 or 4 years of development behind what you could have, without even getting the benefit of being able to get it at the price of a phone a couple cycles behind.
The steam deck is functionally a console. It doesn’t have the volume to manage the same frequency of new devices.